Bruce Carton

Vincente L. Martinez, Chief of the SEC’s Office of Market Intelligence since 2013, is leaving the agency next month. OMI plays a critical role in the SEC’s Enforcement Division’s collection, evaluation, and dissemination of the tips and referrals that come into the agency.

We have written here for years about Andrew Ceresney’s work as the Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. Ceresney joined the SEC in 2013, but he had a long legal career before that–including an interesting case now making headlines from his days in the private sector that involves the Republican Party Nominee for President, Donald Trump.

The upcoming insider-trading trial of a former Perella Weinberg Partners managing director may present “familial betrayal” of the father-son variety. Sean Stewart will go on trial on July 25, 2016, on charges that he tipped his father, Bob Stewart, in advance of five healthcare mergers. Bruce Carton reports.

The SEC has approved several amendments to its rules of practice regarding administrative proceedings. Most notably, the new rules provide parties to APs—for the first time—with the opportunity to conduct a limited number of depositions. Bruce Carton has more.

The SEC announced today that after more than five years as the first-ever chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower, Sean McKessy plans to leave the agency. McKessy joined the SEC to head up its new whistleblower program in February 2011 and has helped get the program on strong footing. Bruce Carton has more.

On June 21, 2016, the SEC announced that the failure of a defendant in an SEC enforcement action to live up to an agreement to “cooperate fully and truthfully” had resulted in that defendant’s penalty being increased from $2,533 to a staggering $980,229. And it could have been worse! Bruce Carton reports.

Irving M. Pollack, a former SEC Commissioner who also served as the agency’s first director of the Enforcement Division, passed away on July 1, 2016 at the age of 98. Pollack served at the SEC for 34 years.

On Wednesday, the SEC suffered its first setback in its FY 2016 federal court trials following a trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico.

Yesterday, C. Dabney O’Riordan of the SEC’s Los Angeles Regional Office was named co-chief of the Division of Enforcement’s Asset Management Unit. She fills the co-chief role left vacant when Marshall Sprung left the agency in April 2016 to join Blackstone Group LP as a managing director and the firm’s global head of compliance.

Instead of trying to come up with new ways to repeatedly express public “disappointment” in the SEC, says enforcement blogger Bruce Carton, perhaps the U.S. Senate could simply do its own job and vote on the two nominees that President Obama nominated back in October 2015. Carton explores reasons behind the delay.