Bruce Carton

Yesterday, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson of the Southern District of Texas announced that his office had filed criminal charges earlier this month against a former investor relations executive named Stephen Gray. The criminal case, which comes on the heels of last month’s criminal case against IR executive Michael Lucarelli, is just the latest example of the […]

After a five-year hiatus, the SEC’s irrepressible Office of Risk Assessment is back yet again. In a press release yesterday, the SEC announced that it had created a new office within the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA) that will “coordinate efforts to provide data-driven risk assessment tools and models to support a wide range […]

Dissenting opinions by SEC commissioners have been issued at a high rate lately, and a particularly barbed dissent came late last month from Commissioner Dan Gallagher. On August 27, 2014, the SEC adopted a new rule prohibiting rating agencies (“nationally recognized statistical rating organizations” or “NRSROs”) from issuing or maintaining a credit rating  where a person within […]

“May you live in interesting times.” Although that expression appears on the surface to be a blessing, it is actually thought to be a Chinese curse, with “interesting” meaning dangerous or turbulent. This month, as I look back on six years of writing this column on regulatory enforcement which I began in August 2008 and […]

Despite significant pressure from members of Congress, the SEC has decided to end a legal dispute with the Securities Investor Protection Corp. in which the SEC has pressed SIPC to pay investors harmed by Allen Stanford’s $7 billion Ponzi scheme. On July 18, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a lower […]

Jeffrey H. Knox, former Chief of the Fraud Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, departed the DOJ last week to join law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP as a partner in its Washington, D.C. office. As Chief of the Fraud Section, Knox led the DOJ’s prosecution of fraud cases including securities […]

In his DealBook column yesterday, Prof. Peter J. Henning offers some new details on the arrest of Michael Lucarelli for insider trading, and raises an interesting question. You may recall that, as I noted here, a barefoot Lucarelli was recently seen sprinting out of the federal courthouse and down Worth Street in lower Manhattan to avoid […]

The SEC announced today that it has awarded more than $300,000 to a whistleblower employee who reported wrongdoing to the SEC after the whistleblower’s company failed to take action when the whistleblower reported it internally. The SEC noted that the award was the first the agency has made to a whistleblower who performed an audit […]

The FBI confirmed last night that it is working with the U.S. Secret Service “to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions.” According to the WSJ, federal investigators are primarily focused on a possible “significant breach of corporate computer security” at J.P. Morgan and up to four other banks. J.P […]