U.S. Bancorp Fires Four of Its Portfolio Managers

U.S. Bancorp said Thursday that four mutual fund portfolio managers, including two at a fund being investigated for questionable trading, have left the company.

The managers were fired Monday after refusing to relocate from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, where U.S. Bancorp is based, one of the managers, John Potter, said in an interview.

Two of the managers ran the fund in which the trading was in question -- the $597-million First American Small Cap Growth Opportunities fund. Potter and another manager ran the $1.21-billion First American Small Cap Select fund.

U.S. Bancorp spokeswoman Cheryl Stone said all left “to pursue other opportunities.”

The bank in February said the Securities and Exchange Commission was informally investigating its U.S. Bancorp Asset Management unit because of questionable trading in 2002 in a security held by Small Cap Growth Opportunities.

The unit, which oversaw more than $127 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, said it discovered the trading in an internal review and notified the SEC. An outside law firm, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, found that none of the unit’s employees violated applicable securities laws, U.S. Bancorp said.

The review didn’t involve market timing or late trading, Lee Mitau, U.S. Bancorp’s general counsel said last month. Those abuses are at the heart of state and federal regulators’ probes of the fund industry.