Marginal Benefits of the Core Securities Laws

By Kevin S. Haeberle August 10, 2020 by renholding

To many, the core securities laws on disclosure, fraud, and insider trading are desirable from an investor-protection perspective. But the dominant law and economics view is dubious of this thinking. Under this view, securities prices are discounted to reflect obstacles …

The Fall of Wirecard

By Todd H. Baker July 8, 2020 by renholding

In the public imagination, Wirecard was Germany’s biggest tech company success story – a €24 billion high-growth payment processor doing deals across the globe and pioneering new technologies. While naysayers complained about its opaque corporate and financial practices and raised …

Explaining Dirks

By Andrew Vollmer June 19, 2020 by renholding

Dirks v. SEC established the fraud claim for tipping as part of the insider trading prohibition in the federal securities laws. An essential element of the claim was proof that the insider personally benefited from disclosing confidential information to the …

Introducing Machine Learning to Corporate Fraud Detection

By Yang Bao, Bin Ke, Bin Li, Y. Julia Yu and Jie Zhang June 5, 2020 by renholding

Accounting fraud is a worldwide problem with potentially serious consequences, but it is often detected after the damage has been done. Hence, efficient and effective methods of detecting corporate accounting fraud would offer significant value to regulators, auditors, and investors.…

Private Company Fraud and Enforcement

By Verity Winship March 30, 2020 by renholding

Companies can get big without going public. The number of U.S. listed companies is down by half, and the last few years have seen more capital raised on the private side than on the public side. Despite this well-documented shift …

The Blaszczak Bombshell: A Return to the “Parity of Information” Theory of Insider Trading?

By John C. Coffee, Jr. February 26, 2020 by renholding

The law of insider trading generally moves with the speed of molasses in February. For every two steps forward, there is one (or more) steps backward. But this winter has seen a rapid succession of developments. First, the Himes Bill …

Recent Trends in SEC Penalties Against Public Companies

By David Rosenfeld February 10, 2020 by renholding

Over the past 20 years, civil penalties have become an increasingly important part of the SEC’s enforcement program. The agency frequently imposes large monetary penalties, highlights those penalties in press releases, and touts them in end-of-year statistics. Civil penalties are …

Cleary Gottlieb Discusses Second Circuit’s High Bar for Securities Fraud Pleadings

By Carmine D. Boccuzzi, Jr., Roger Cooper and Jared Gerber December 17, 2019 by renholding

On December 10, 2019, the Second Circuit, in Gamm v. Sanderson Farms, held that when a securities fraud complaint alleges that statements were rendered false or misleading through the non-disclosure of illegal activity, the facts of the underlying wrongdoing …

Financial Misconduct and Changes in Employee Satisfaction

By Yuqing Zhou and Christos Makridis November 22, 2019 by renholding

In a recent paper, we use new and proprietary micro-data from company-ratings site Glassdoor for the period between 2008 and 2016 to investigate changes in employees’ perception of firms and managers during periods of financial misconduct and after the public …

SEC Chairman Delivers Remarks on Elder Investor Fraud

By Jay Clayton October 4, 2019 by renholding

Thank you all for being here this morning for the Roundtable on Combatting Elder Investor Fraud.

On behalf of the SEC, I want to say we are privileged to host such a dedicated group of experts and public servants. Protecting

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Do Credit Rating Agencies Detect Accounting Frauds?

By Allen Huang, Pepa Kraft and Shiheng Wang September 13, 2019 by renholding

Accounting fraud imposes severe costs on firms and their stakeholders. Firms at which fraud occurs often have inefficient resource allocation and face higher cost of capital and regulatory penalties. While shareholders suffer the brunt of these damages, frauds can also …

Davis Polk Discusses UK Serious Fraud Office’s New Cooperation Guidance

By Greg D. Andres, Angela T. Burgess, Neil H. MacBride, Tatiana R. Martins and Paul J. Nathanson August 15, 2019 by renholding

On August 6, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (“SFO”) published new guidance on the steps companies should take in order to receive cooperation credit in the SFO’s charging decisions. The document, titled “Corporate Co-operation Guidance” (the “SFO Guidance”),[1]…

Insider Trading As Fraud

By Zachary Gubler July 16, 2019 by renholding

U.S. Insider trading law is strange. Because Congress has never adopted a comprehensive statute on the subject, insider trading law is largely a species of federal common law. That’s not to say that the Supreme Court has nothing to go …

SEC Commissioner Jackson Dissents from Proposed Amendments to Sarbanes-Oxley

By Robert J. Jackson, Jr. May 10, 2019 by renholding

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the Staff in the Division of Corporation Finance, including John Fieldsend, Elizabeth Murphy, Felicia Kung, Lindsay McCord, and Director Bill Hinman, for their work in developing today’s release. I also appreciate the

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Insider Trading and Executive Overreach

By Kevin R. Douglas March 22, 2019 by renholding

The recent controversy over President Donald Trump’s use of his emergency authority to fund a wall on the U.S. southern border has awakened many Americans to the problem of executive overreach. Yet, what few may appreciate is that executive overreach …

Double Trouble: An Analysis of IRS Attention and Financial Reporting

By Zackery D. Fox and Ryan J. Wilson February 7, 2019 by renholding

Existing research provides limited insight into what draws the attention of tax authorities to public information and how that information is used in the process of examining corporate tax positions. For publicly traded firms in the U.S., the Internal Revenue …

Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes

By Tao Li, Baolian Wang and Donghwa Shin January 7, 2019 by renholding

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have recently emerged as a popular method of financing blockchain-related startups. In an ICO, a startup creates and distributes its digital tokens, typically in exchange for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or fiat currencies such as U.S. dollars to …

New York Attorney General Overreaches in Climate-Change Complaint Against Exxon

By Merritt B. Fox December 10, 2018 by renholding

The New York Attorney General (“NYAG”) recently filed a complaint against ExxonMobil alleging that the company violated the Martin Act, New York State’s securities law, by making material misstatements concerning how it was accounting for the possibility of increasingly stringent …

The Local Spillover Effect of Corporate Accounting Cases

By Eric Holzman, Brian P. Miller and Brian Williams October 5, 2018 by renholding

The consequences for companies and individuals directly involved in corporate accounting misconduct are severe. Research has documented that after such misconduct is revealed, the market value of corporations declines, executives are terminated, and auditors are often dismissed. While the implications …

Cleary Gottlieb Discusses Ruling that FIRREA Statute of Limitations Covers Offenses by Banks

By Jennifer Kennedy Park, Nowell D. Bamberger and Alison Bitterly July 31, 2018 by renholding

A federal district court in California has become the latest court to hold that the 10-year statute of limitations under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 (“FIRREA”) for offenses “affecting a financial institution” extends to offenses …

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The CLS Blue Sky Blog

Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets

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