Dow Jones is suing bond brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald to avoid paying Cantor US$12 million for bond data it once sold through its market data service, Telerate, according to the New York Post.

The Post says that papers filed in New York state Supreme Court show Dow Jones seeking a declaratory judgment stating it can stop paying Cantor for bond data because Telerate went out of business.

Dow Jones sold off Telerate to Bridge Information Systems for US$510 million in 1998 but was still contractually obligated to guarantee payments to Cantor until 2006. The filing says that came to US$12 million per fiscal quarter.

Telerate and Bridge filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and Telerate was shut down last month. Dow Jones vice president Steven Goldstein told the Post, “We stood behind them when they were Telerate, but now there’s nothing left for us to guarantee. There’s no disputing they’re out of business.”

The Post reports that the court filing says Telerate owes both its success and its demise to Cantor, because Cantor had exclusive rights to distribute real-time U.S. government securities data. “No other such data was available to the public,” the suit says, until 1999, when Cantor launched eSpeed, which allowed its users to do the same thing.

“We wish Cantor well,” Goldstein told the Post, but “we think this is a responsible way to handle this.”