Bruce Carton

The SEC announced today that it has hired Adam Storch as its first-ever “Managing Executive of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.” In this newly-created post, Storch will essentially function as the Enforcement Division’s first “chief operating officer.” Storch will report to Robert Khuzami, the Director of the Enforcement Division. Storch’s responsibilities will reportedly include: project […]

Remember Coopers & Lybrand? It was one of the predecessor firms that merged with Price Waterhouse in 1998 to form the global network of PricewaterhouseCoopers. It has now been over a decade since Coopers & Lybrand existed, but according to the UK’s Financial Services Authority and PwC itself, certain individuals are now playing off of […]

Ten months after the filing of an administrative claim against the SEC that the agency refused to settle, two investors are now suing the SEC in federal court for its alleged negligence in failing to detect the Bernard Madoff scheme. The plaintiffs are Phyllis Molchatsky and Steven Schneider. The WSJ reports that Molchatsky lost $1.7 […]

Yesterday, the Dutch central bank took control of DSB Bank after a run on the institution that appears to have been fueled by “tweets” on Twitter. The FT reports that this weekend, talks to sell the privately-held bank to a consortium of the five biggest Dutch banks failed. Wouter Bos, the Dutch finance minister, blamed […]

For the Securities and Exchange Commission, which operates on a fiscal year that ends every September, Oct. 1, 2009, could not come soon enough. It seems almost beyond dispute that the agency’s fiscal 2009 was the most dismal in its history, and perhaps the most transformational. Now it feels like decades ago, but at the […]

This week, a very rare occurrence — a trial in a securities class action — got underway in Manhattan in the Vivendi litigation. Adam Savett, head of RiskMetrics’ Securities Class Action Services which actually tracks these trials, spoke with me today about how uncommon they are, the types of verdicts that have resulted to date, […]

The SEC has demanded a jury trial in its high-profile lawsuit against Bank of America for misleading shareholders about huge bonus payments ahead of its merger with Merrill Lynch. The trial date has now been pushed back to March 2010. One legal observer called the SEC’s demand for a jury trial “brilliant” because a “jury […]

Back in September 2008, I posed the following question (in “Enforcement Action: Oncology Edition”): So which is worse — inducing shareholders to purchase $6.5 million of your company’s stock by falsely depicting the company as being on the verge of success curing cancer? Or defrauding a federal judge by falsely depicting yourself as having cancer […]

In the UK, two senior bankers at Dresdner Kleinwort bank have been found guilty by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of cheating their clients. Notably, however, the two men will receive no sanctions whatsoever after an industry panel appeared to credit their defense that the insider trading at issue was a “normal market practice.” The […]

As previously discussed here, Hertz Global Holdings recently filed a lawsuit against research firm Audit Integrity after Audit Integrity listed Hertz and 19 other large companies as “likely to go bankrupt or suffer severe financial distress.” Hertz claims that Audit Integrity reached “incomplete and misleading conclusions.” In a press release today, Audit Integrity stated that […]