Bruce Carton

News sure to please corporate compliance and legal officers everywhere: The SEC has finally published guidance on how it decides whether to bring enforcement matters to court or in-agency administrative proceedings. The SEC has been bringing more actions against companies as administrative proceedings, sparking complaints that targets’ due process rights are weakened. More inside.

This week, SEC Chair Mary Jo White appeared before a skeptical Senate Appropriations Committee in support of the agency’s request for $1.722 billion in FY 2016 — a 15 percent increase over the SEC’s budget in FY 2015.

Steve Cohen’s Point72 announced that this week that it has hired former DOJ prosecutor and SEC enforcement attorney Kevin O’Connor as its new general counsel.

In the UK, insider trading prosecutions are pretty rare. Indeed, there had never even been a criminal insider trading case in the UK until 2009, and to date there have only been a total of about two dozen criminal convictions for insider trading in the UK.  Pardip Saini is one of the few UK defendants who […]

This week, a data services company called Selerity used an automated system and some very aggressive digging to obtain early — and highly lucrative — information about Twitter’s earnings.

Image: Having already left his mark on how the SEC handles deferred-prosecution agreements and other settlements, U.S. Judge Jed Rakoff now appears to be focused on another key securities enforcement issue: the definition of insider trading. More inside.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has named Katherine Goldstein as Chief and Telemachus Kasulis as Deputy Chief of that office’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force.

Back in 2012, I recommended a “must-read” article by WSJ reporters Susan Pulliam, Michael Rothfeld and Jenny Strasburg about FBI agent David Makol. The article provided some fascinating insight into the tactics that Makol, then the FBI’s go-to guy for “flipping” suspects in insider trading investigations, used so successfully in persuading witnesses to wear a […]

From the depths of the D.C. Metro system comes a social media campaign from an advocacy group that depicts SEC Chairman Mary Jo White as a superhero. The campaign revolves around the concept of White with a cape and an MJW logo, taking down the scourge of “dark money.” See inside.