Insider Trading: It's Not Just for Suits
On Sept. 30, 2010, the SEC brought an insider trading case against two railroad employees and their relatives, alleging that the defendants reaped more than $1 million in illegal gains by trading on nonpublic information about the planned takeover of the railroad company.
Honest-Services Fraud in the Wake of Skillings
The Supreme Court has tried again to restrict application of the honest-services fraud statute (18 U.S.C. ' 1346), which has been zealously used by prosecutors to target a wide swath of allegedly unethical behavior by public officials and private employees alike.
And at the Whistle, They're Off
The new Dodd-Frank Act not only alters the manner in which companies will handle their own compliance and disclosure obligations; it may dramatically change the way issuers conduct internal investigations.
The UK's Impending Power Play and Why It Matters to You
Over the past several years, the United Kingdom has been flexing its muscles in the global anti-corruption arena with the imposition of large penalties against companies involved in foreign-bribery offenses, focusing on individual accountability for corporate officials, close coordination with U.S. prosecutors in parallel investigations, and enforcement tools such as self-disclosures, settlements and negotiated plea agreements.
Child Pornography on Workplace Computers
What are the implications of having child pornography on the premises? In businesses, child pornography generally is discovered by IT personnel. Or, if a corporation undergoes an unrelated internal investigation in which all computers, hard drives, e-mail servers, etc. are frozen and searched for responsive material, such a search can to lead to the discovery of child pornography stored on the corporation's server or on an individual's hard drive. What can/must/should be done as a result?
The Courts: Active Players in White-Collar Cases
In June, the Supreme Court unanimously held that Enron's former CEO Jeffrey Skilling did not commit "honest services" fraud, ruling that the statute under which he was convicted must be limited to bribery and kickback schemes to avoid constitutional concerns over vagueness. The decision should curtail prosecution of a variety of conduct that the government would otherwise seek to criminalize through the statute. In contrast, the courts are expanding the reach of other criminal statutes to encompass conduct previously regarded as outside their scope.
