Is it a blinding statement of the obvious to say that trust in the world's banks has suffered lately? Indeed, just when you think you're ready to move past the steady drumbeat of disconcerting revelations, something else crops up to test your faith. Only last week, Citigroup, once the world's biggest bank, settled regulatory accusations that it hid tens of billions of dollars in bad assets as the subprime mortgage storm intensified in 2007 -- making Citi's finances appear much less imperiled than they actually were. Remember, financial wizards like Robert Rubin and Charles Prince helped oversee Citi during the years that it stuffed itself so full of those toxic assets that taxpayers had to be called upon to bail out the bank. Here's yet another data point: the recent conclusion of a lawsuit filed by a unit of Grupo Televisa, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, against its longtime lender, JPMorgan Chase. The complaint was filed in December in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Empresas Cablevision, a Grupo Televisa telecom unit that had borrowed $225 million from JPMorgan in late 2007. Cablevision used the money to expand its Mexican operations. According to court documents, JPMorgan had intended to syndicate the loan but the growing credit crisis in 2008 forced the bank to hold on to it. In early 2009, after the financial storm had quieted, the bank explored selling the loan in cooperation with Televisa to three international banks -- HSBC, BNP Paribas and Scotia Bank. But the parties couldn't agree on terms. And what happened next drove a wedge between the client and the bank it had dealt with in confidence and trust for more than a decade. According to Cablevision, JPMorgan began quietly negotiating to sell the loan in March to Banco Inbursa, a Mexican bank controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim Helu and his family. Banco Inbursa has common ownership with Telmex, a Mexican conglomerate that is a primary competitor of Empresas Cablevision. Inbursa struck a deal to buy 90 percent of the Cablevision loan from JPMorgan in May 2009. But Cablevision did not find out about the deal until about two weeks later when HSBC let it know. Initially, JPMorgan denied striking a deal with Inbursa, but later the same day JPMorgan asked Cablevision to agree to the transaction, according to court papers. In early June, Cablevision vetoed the proposed assignment on the grounds that it could cause serious harm to the company if a major competitor like Banco Inbursa had access to confidential information about its operations. That's why Cablevision originally made sure it had veto power over such assignments when it negotiated the JPMorgan loan. Nevertheless, JPMorgan agreed to sell the loan to Inbursa on July 15, 2009, court documents show. It did not inform Cablevision and went ahead with the deal despite Grupo Televisa and other banks being interested in purchasing part of the loan. When it sold the loan to Inbursa, JPMorgan structured it as a participation agreement rather than an assignment; such agreements can be sold without the borrower's consent. Still, the terms of the original Cablevision loan stated that participations could be sold only if the lending relationship between JPMorgan and Cablevision did not change significantly. Cablevision argued that the transaction with Inbursa did just that. Cablevision learned that the sale to Inbursa required JPMorgan to hand over virtually any information Inbursa wanted about Cablevision. Court documents show that this language was added to the agreement at Inbursa's request. In addition, Inbursa received a right of first refusal to any transfers that JPMorgan wanted to make of the remaining 10 percent of the Cablevision loan it held. Moreover, if the loan went into default, Inbursa could become a direct lender, allowing it to exercise its rights directly against Cablevision. This clause, which court testimony described as atypical for loan participations, was inserted at Inbursa's request, the documents show. A spokesman for JPMorgan said the bank honored the terms and conditions of its contract with Cablevision at all times. A spokesman for Slim and Banco Inbursa declined to comment. (In 2009, The New York Times Co. borrowed $250 million from companies controlled by Slim. They own almost 7 percent of The Times Co.'s Class A shares; warrants attached to the loan could increase that stake to 16.2 percent.) In December, Cablevision filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the transaction. And on Jan. 28, Judge Jed S. Rakoff granted the preliminary injunction in U.S. District Court. In his order, he concluded that JPMorgan's deal with Banco Inbursa was 'an end-run, if not a downright sham' that was intended to circumvent Cablevision's right to veto the loan's sale. The judge's preliminary injunction was upheld by the appellate court last spring, and a trial to determine whether JPMorgan had violated its duty of good faith and fair dealing to Cablevision was scheduled for July 26. On July 21, JPMorgan decided to unwind the deal, buying back the loan from Inbursa. Two days later, JPMorgan agreed to permanently bar the sale of the loan to any of Slim's companies. As part of that agreement, 10 JPMorgan officials are barred from working on the Cablevision loan in the future. Among them is Steven Black, vice chairman of JPMorgan, and Daniel Pinto, global co-head of the bank's fixed-income unit. The JPMorgan spokesman said that neither Black nor Pinto would comment. Lawyers for Cablevision say the entire transaction raises questions about how closely JPMorgan protected Cablevision's interests. 'What was very troubling here was that JPMorgan seemed to be pursuing its own interests with real disregard for the rights of a longtime client,' said Stephen Neuwirth, a partner at Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart, Oliver & Sullivan who represented Empresas Cablevision. E-mails and other documents produced in the case suggest JPMorgan was ready to dump its longtime client. For example, a message from Nicolas Aguzin, JPMorgan's chief executive in Latin America, said Grupo Televisa was 'obnoxious' and urged his colleagues to 'sell our stake and write the client off.' Never mind that Grupo Televisa had selected JPMorgan to underwrite a significant bond offering in May 2008 and Empresas Cablevision had agreed to raise the interest rate slightly on the 2007 loan from JPMorgan to try to help the bank syndicate it. And banks wonder why some of their customers are having trouble feeling the love. 