Bruce Carton

Computer Sciences Corp. is settling an SEC enforcement action relating to accounting errors in the company’s 2009-2012 financial statements. As part of the settlement, CSC will pay a penalty of $190 million and restate past financial statements. CSC said the errors concerned operations in Europe and Australia, and the company’s contractual relationship with the U.K. National Health Service. More inside.

The UK press reported this week that a trader named Joe Lewis of Yorkshire has disappeared after admitting earlier this month that his investment firm actually stopped operating back in 2009. Despite the firm not engaging in any trading for years, investors in JL Trading continued to receive detailed monthly trading statements until September 2014, […]

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” — Sean Parker, The Social Network   In 2009, when Irving Picard and his law firm, Baker & Hostetler, had been working as trustee on the Madoff case for less than a year, I observed that the firm had already been awarded total attorneys’ fees of $37.5 […]

Yesterday, the SEC announced an interesting enforcement action against investment management firm F-Squared Investments and its former CEO, Howard Present. According to the SEC, F-Squared misled investors between September 2008 and September 2013 by touting a lengthy record of stellar performance that was, in fact, not only hypothetical but substantially inflated. Specifically, the SEC alleges, F-Squared […]

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Gilliam is currently a partner and and vice-chair of Covinton & Burling’s White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group. President Obama nominated Gilliam in August 2014 to fill a spot that will be […]

As I did in FY 2014, I am again tracking the SEC’s trials and outcomes for FY 2015 in this running SEC Trial Scorecard.    To date in FY 2015, which began on October 1, 2014, the SEC has had three trials in federal court reach a verdict (see the full list below). The most recent […]

Add the New York Department of Financial Services to the growing list list of regulators (such as the SEC and FINRA) who will be scrutinizing the cybersecurity practices of Wall Street banks and financial institutions.  On Wednesday, Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s Superintendant of Financial Services, stated in a letter to all chartered or licensed banking […]

“Madoff secretary gets 6 years after judge cites ‘small stature’”   When I came across the headline above in yesterday’s New York Post, I thought that while “small stature” was an odd way to characterize the role of Madoff’s secretary in his massive fraud, it did make sense that someone who played a small role in […]

In July 2014, I noted here that although it had taken over five years, the wheels of justice were finally in motion against B. Ramalinga Raju, former chairman and CEO of Satyam Computer Services, as India’s securities regulator had ordered Raju, his brother, and two others to disgorge $307 million. In January 2009, Raju publicly […]

It took more than three years, but Britain’s Serious Fraud Office has finally obtained its first convictions under the U.K. Bribery Act. According to the SFO, two men have been found guilty of conspiring to use false e-mail addresses to produce bogus sales invoices, an offense uncovered by an investigation into Sustainable Growth Group and certain of its subsidiaries. Details inside.