You walk into a restaurant that smells of lemon and thyme and that expects you to be impressed because the napkins are folded like origami. Columbia Management is that restaurant – luxe lighting, a slick website, people in neat suits who talk about “client-first outcomes” and “stewardship”. Under the linen, the kitchen is a different story. There are burned pans, corners cut, and a cook who quietly pockets the till when no one’s watching.

This is not a smear. It’s a ledger of things regulators, journalists and markets have already written down – a roll-call of sloppy ethics, bungled risk, and the sort of “we’ll fix it” that reads like corporate theatre.

The market-timing scandal – the one that smells of insider favouritism

In the early 2000s Columbia was caught letting certain customers trade like they were at a casino table while telling regular savers the house rules were different. The SEC said Columbia allowed secret short-term trading arrangements that were explicitly against their prospectuses. The result? Lawsuits, enforcement action and a big stain on trust.

In plain terms – if you’re a long-term saver in a mutual fund and managers secretly let a handful of favoured traders jump in and out, those favoured traders get the better price and you end up paying the bill. That’s not just sloppy – it’s theft by design.

The cash-fund collapse – when “safe” turned out to be not safe at all

Fast forward to 2007 and the markets choke. Columbia’s Strategic Cash Portfolio – pitched as a yield booster for big institutional clients – turned out to be stuffed with dodgy mortgage-linked debt. When the market soured the fund couldn’t keep its value. Institutional clients fled. Columbia and Bank of America were left shovelling cash and promises to stop it from completely blowing up.

I don’t sugar-coat this – a fund sold as “liquid” and “safeish” that holds illiquid, risky paper is dangerous. For pension funds and councils who put money there it was a wake-up call. For Columbia it was the sort of reputational bruise that doesn’t fade with PR.

The parent-bank bailouts and fire sales – papered-over panic

When your funds go dodgy, the parent bank often steps in to put a polite face over the mess. Bank of America effectively propped up some Columbia products and later sold off Columbia’s long-term asset business to Ameriprise for about $1 billion. Translation – someone had to tidy the wreckage and move on. Shareholders pay. Taxpayers don’t – but clients and employees feel the fallout.

Internal theft and transfer-agent failures – incompetence with real victims

In a later chapter, a transfer-agent employee abused access to shareholder accounts and misappropriated funds. Columbia discovered it, repaid victims and fired the employee — but regulators found the safeguards were insufficient in the first place. That’s not an “oops”. That’s a failure to protect people’s money from an insider who had the keys to the safe.

The tidy rebrand – same kitchen, new sign?

Ameriprise bought Columbia’s long-term business, folded it into its asset-management arm and kept the Columbia name for distribution. That move was sold as “stability” and “continuity”. But buying a brand doesn’t auto-fix culture, process or the memory of past scandals. It’s the same building with different decoration.

Are they shareholders in Cummins? Yes – and they’re not small players

Columbia, via its Columbia-branded funds (for example Columbia Dividend Income and Columbia Dividend Value), does hold Cummins stock. The public filings and fund-holding trackers show Columbia funds owning roughly around 0.4–0.5% positions in Cummins in mid-2025 – several hundred thousand shares across funds (figures vary by reporting date and share class). In plain language – they have skin in the game. That makes Columbia another institutional node in the Cummins ecosystem – yet another big financial name with the power to vote, influence and profit from corporate behaviour.

So yes – another company inside the Cummins orbit that, based on its history, has shown it can be cavalier with risk, opaque with favours, and slow to fix internal controls. Call it “alternative ideas on ethical behaviour” if you want a corporate euphemism. I call it: “handle with caution”.

Why this matters to the everyday reader

You might not own Columbia funds, and you might not work at Cummins, but this hits home in three ways:

Pensions and savings: institutional missteps ripple down into the funds that pension schemes and retail investors rely on. A rotten fund decision gets felt by ordinary savers eventually.
Accountability: firms that repeatedly show weak controls or ethical lapses are more likely to make costly mistakes later. That’s not conjecture – it’s risk maths.
Influence: big asset managers don’t just hold shares – they vote on board matters, they lend legitimacy and they help set market norms. If those managers have messy ethics, corporate governance suffers.

Final Note

What to look out for next time you hear “Columbia Management” mentioned:

Regulatory press releases and enforcement actions – they tell you when the neat words hit legal reality.
Fund holdings and 13F/portfolio reports – they show whether Columbia keeps buying into the companies it claims to steward.
Parent-company moves – sales, buyouts and restructures often happen after a mess; they’re not always a fix.

This is not fan fiction. It’s a stitched-together history of missteps, enforcement and corporate clean-ups. The suits will keep smiling in their investor decks. The people who actually lost sleep and money after the Strategic Cash losses and the market-timing fallout remember the smell of burned stock and why due diligence sometimes matters more than slick branding.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Shareholder Spotlight : Columbia Management – Another Polished Suit With Muddy Hands