James Patten, who helped orchestrate a stock manipulation scheme that led to a company that owned a single money-losing New Jersey deli being valued at $100 million, was sentenced to 21 months in prison on Tuesday. Patten, 67, asked Judge Christine O’Hearn to sentence him to no time in prison at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Camden, New…
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, announced today that VADIM KOMISSAROV, the former Chief Executive Officer of Trident Acquisitions Corp. (“TDAC”), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (“SPAC”), was sentenced to three years in prison for committing securities fraud in connection with a scheme to defraud TDAC investors and investors in TDAC’s successor…
Defense lawyers for convicted activist short seller Andrew Left demanded a mistrial Friday, citing an unusual courtroom error that they say tainted the entire verdict and demanding a rerun of the case that gripped Wall Street. Left’s legal team spotted that jurors used an out-of-date court form to issue their verdict, which included a count accusing Left of lying to…
President Donald Trump has pardoned former U.S. Representative Stephen Buyer, an Indiana Republican, who was convicted of securities fraud ?for engaging in insider trading in 2018 as a T-Mobile US ?consultant ahead of a $23 billion merger with Sprint. The proclamation, issued on Thursday and announced by the White House on Friday, gave no specific rationale for the pardon other…
Justice Department leaders have reached a temporary staffing compromise to return white-collar units to the Criminal Division fraud section, after they’d been transferred to the Trump administration’s new fraud division, said two people familiar with the move. An organizational memo circulating internally Thursday states that market integrity and consumer fraud teams will go back to their original fraud section home,…
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, and Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), James C. Barnacle, Jr., announced today the unsealing of a complaint charging MICHELE SPAGNUOLO, a/k/a “AlphaRaccoon,” a software engineer at Google, with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering arising…
The charming French town of Vierzon should have been an oasis of calm for crypto executive David Balland and his wife. Instead, it became the scene of 48 hours of terror. The cryptocurrency executive, who founded Ledger, was kidnapped from his home in the town by a criminal gang demanding a $10m (£7.4m) ransom. French police launched a desperate manhunt…
For decades, the information that fueled insider trading was found on Wall Street or inside the glass offices of public companies across the country.
The rise of prediction markets has created a new temptation in Washington, where the Trump administration’s fast-moving agenda is giving those privy to government information a chance to cash in on the volatility.
Regulators and prosecutors are now playing catch-up to combat a batch of suspicious betting that touches various corners of the federal bureaucracy. It is a new challenge for authorities because insider-trading laws weren’t designed for people who bet on the outcome of legislation, political races and even U.S. military operations.
Source: Suspicious Betting in Washington Is on the Rise—and Authorities Are Playing Catch-Up – WSJ
When the Justice Department indicted India’s richest man in the final weeks of the Biden administration, prosecutors described an “elaborate” bribery scheme involving “corruption and fraud at the expense of U.S. investors.”
Now, according to several people with knowledge of the case, the Justice Department is planning to drop the charges altogether.
The reversal came after the Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, hired a new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., one of President Trump’s personal lawyers and the co-chairman of the prominent firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
Source: U.S. Set to Drop Charges Against Indian Billionaire Accused of Fraud – The New York Times
Wall Street’s top prosecutors want lawbreaking companies to hand themselves in, offering behind-closed-door deals that let them avoid being charged, fined or having full details of their fraud made public.
The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which secured huge fines and guilty pleas from companies such as Drexel Burnham Lambert and Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital, has been meeting big law firms and corporate advisers in recent weeks to promote its softer approach to white-collar crime.
The lenient new deals are available even in cases where alleged fraud was pervasive, caused severe harm, involved senior leaders and had already been reported in the press or by a whistleblower.
Source: Self-report fraud and walk free, New York prosecutors tell Wall Street