A U.S. appeals court on Friday temporarily paused new rules issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requiring public companies to report climate-related risks. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request from Liberty Energy Inc. and Nomad Proppant Services LLC to put the rules on hold while it considers the oilfield companies’ lawsuit challenging…
Mohammed Ali Rashid was found liable in 2020 of submitting $290,000 in fraudulent expenses to Apollo funds, getting them to pay for items including trips to Brazil and Hawaii, salon hair cuts, spa treatments and dinners at high-end Manhattan restaurants. The federal appeals court in Manhattan on Wednesday said he clearly committed fraud but overturned the earlier ruling, saying that…
A U.S. appeals court upheld Nasdaq’s board diversity rule on Wednesday, requiring companies listed on the exchange to have women and minority directors on their boards or explain why they do not. In a lengthy opinion, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected lawsuits seeking to block the rule by the National Center for Public Policy Research…
Whether or not Ripple violated securities law in making XRP available to retail investors by putting it on crypto exchanges is absolutely a question that needs appeals court intervention, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) argued Friday. The SEC filed a response to a Ripple memo which argued the opposite as part of its ongoing case against the crypto…
In April, Coinbase filed an Administrative Procedure Act challenge asking the court to force the SEC’s hand and get the regulator to respond to its 2022 petition for formal rulemaking in the digital assets sector, arguing that the existing requirements are ill-suited for digital assets. Now, the SEC has been ordered to explain within 7 days if it intends to…
Grayscale wants to convert its $14 billion Bitcoin Trust, the largest investment vehicle tied to the No. 1 cryptocurrency, into an exchange-traded fund. But the Securities and Exchange Commission rejected the plan in June, saying cryptocurrency markets are too ripe for fraud and manipulation. Grayscale sued, asking a federal appeals court to overturn a decision the company called arbitrary. The…
The SEC convinced an appeals court that jurors should’ve had a chance to decide whether a Virginia mortgage broker traded on inside information regarding a Gartner acquisition, unwinding a rare agency loss in an insider trading case. Based on evidence the Securities and Exchange Commission presented during a 2021 trial, jurors could have reasonably concluded that Christopher Clark traded on…
In a recent column I called the SEC out for its appalling dereliction of duty in refusing to decide administrative appeals from enforcement sanctions imposed by the agency’s administrative law judges (ALJs)…. *** In my research for that column, I largely ignored the SEC’s parallel appellate docket: Appeals from enforcement sanctions imposed by the so-called self-regulatory organizations (“SROs”), primarily the Financial…
A divided appeals court on Tuesday rejected the insider trading convictions of four men, including an ex-government employee turned consultant, prompting a sharp dissent from a judge who says the ruling may prompt insiders to sell confidential government information to the highest bidders. The decision of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came in a case in which a…
Cochran and Jarkesy threaten the viability of the SEC’s home courts. But the reported death of the SEC’s enforcement regime at large has been greatly exaggerated. Before the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, the SEC could bring securities fraud actions against non-registered parties only in federal court. While the SEC increased its use of administrative proceedings post-Dodd-Frank, the…