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A former UBS Group AG senior strategist who now makes ends meet with an hourly job at a grocery store says the Swiss bank’s planned financing for the iconic Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in 2012 conflicted with his bearish reports on the industry, helping end his career.

Trevor Murray, who is suing the bank over his dismissal, was a lead researcher on commercial mortgage-backed securities at UBS from 2011 to 2012. He told a Manhattan federal jury on Thursday that he was let go shortly after he ignored a request to scrap a report about how a double-dip recession could hurt the hotel industry’s real estate.

Kenneth Cohen, who at that time led commercial real estate finance at the bank, told Murray in a hallway of UBS’s Manhattan office not to “write anything negative about the hotel sector” because the bank was working on financing for the Fontainebleau, Murray said on the second day of trial. He said he wrote the report anyway, alerting clients to his concerns.

“At that point, I was fed up,” Murray, 46, told jurors.

By then, Murray said, he’d already been rebuffed by his boss after complaining that his relationship with his internal clients had become untenable, that the bank’s CMBS traders wanted him to be “a shill for the industry.”

He said his boss told him to accept their demands and not alienate himself by issuing conflicting reports. Murray said he’d also been excluded from UBS client meetings at a key industry conference and told that his reports needed pre-clearance before publishing, he testified.

Cohen didn’t respond to email messages seeking comment. Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America Corp., where Cohen works now, referred questions to UBS.

Murray, who relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, filed his lawsuit in August 2012. He’s seeking back pay worth more than $3 million plus unspecified damages for allegedly violating the whistle-blower protections enacted as part of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law.

Law.com Pro