Ken Leech, the 70-year-old former Chief Investment Officer of Western Asset Management Company (WAMCO), a subsidiary of Franklin Templeton, has been charged by US authorities with running a fraudulent 'cherry-picking' scheme. Leech allegedly engaged in a multi-year scheme to allocate favorable trades to certain portfolios while assigning unfavorable trades to others, a practice known as cherry-picking. This scheme is said to have involved over $600 million. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have accused Leech of disproportionately allocating better-performing trades to favored portfolios and worse-performing trades to others. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also filed a complaint against Leech for these practices.