BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, March 5, 2013 Sterne Agee Group, Inc.

(Sterne Agee) issued the following statement in response to the civil lawsuit filed March 1, 2013 by a former employee, Brian Barze, in Jefferson County (Alabama) Circuit Court. Sterne Agee is an employee-owned company, with a board of directors, providing through its subsidiaries, from coast to coast, a broad range of financial services and traces its corporate history back to 1901. In August 2012, after top management learned that Mr. Barze had created financial statement inaccuracies in material amounts in Sterne Agees books and records, which resulted in an unanticipated write down to Sterne Agees 2012 financials, Sterne Agee terminated Mr. Barzes employment for cause for such actions, and for violation of his fiduciary duties as the Chief Financial Officer. Despite being terminated for cause, Mr. Barze has filed claims outside of his contract, seeking non-contractual severance pay and claiming defamation with regard to his misconduct which triggered the termination of his employment. Sterne Agee and its CEO, James S. Holbrook, Jr. (Holbrook), state that the only party who committed a breach of duty was Mr. Barze and emphatically deny his version of events and his claims, which are without merit. In the spring of 2009, Mr. Barze, first indirectly, and then more directly, solicited employment with Sterne Agee, and eventually, Mr. Barze persuaded Sterne Agee that he should be hired. Contrary to his allegations, Sterne Agee did not solicit him for employment. An experienced businessman and CPA at the time in 2009, Mr. Barze willingly negotiated and signed a written employment agreement prior to his employment with Sterne Agee, which provided that he was an at will employee and did not include (and he knew it did not include) any contractual, enforceable commitment to pay severance benefits (absent a change in control of the company), for which he is now attempting to make a case. For three years after signing such employment agreement, Mr. Barze never raised any complaint that his employment agreement failed to contain any essential term or condition of his employment. In an effort to lever Sterne Agee into paying him severance pay for which Sterne Agee has no contractual obligation, Mr. Barze recently threatened to make allegations unconnected with his underlying breach of contract claim and unconnected with his financial reporting misconduct that he terms abusive spending at Sterne Agee. Sterne Agee rejected Mr. Barze's improper efforts, and so Mr. Barze sued Sterne Agee.

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In Mr. Barzes suit, he submits a list of corporate expenditures in a range of categories that are entirely customary in the industry and that are wholly irrelevant to the actual contractual severance pay issue he sues upon, based on his initial hire some three years earlier. Such irrelevant allegations are due to be stricken from the case because they were inserted for an improper (coercive and inflammatory) purpose, but Sterne Agee notes the following, in any event: Mr. Barze has overstated (and in some instances, grossly so) the true numbers and mischaracterized the purposes of such expenditures. Mr. Barze has improperly combined non-current-expense items, and items creating assets, with ordinary expense items. All expenses were legitimate, authorized and for business purposes. All such expenditure items were widely known among Sterne Agees employees and shareholders. The expenditures were for either valid, customary benefits for employees of the company, for promotion and continuation of business with clients, or for charitable purposes and for the greater communitys benefit. With regard to the categories of expenditures which were to reward and benefit employees, Mr. Barze and, in many instances, members of his family, regularly, repeatedly and directly participated in and personally benefitted from such expenditures, including: usage of the company condominiums; the company plane and boat; fishing and hunting events; company tickets for numerous football games; and shareholder/employee dinners. Despite the foregoing, at no time during his three year tenure at Sterne Agee, did Mr. Barze complain to top management of anything improper about such expenditures, including those benefitting himself and his family, or for that matter, any other financial aspect of the company. The Barze suit is unfounded and based upon untrue and inaccurate statements. Sterne Agee and its CEO will vigorously defend against each of the Barze claims.

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