This past year has seen some good economic and political news: a longstanding source of friction between Iran and other world powers was resolved peacefully in a victory for diplomacy, which leads consequently to a second piece of good news, the re-opening this year of a growth market for various businesses at a time when Sovereign Wealth Funds and other […]
Short stories, novellas, fables – they all serve the salutary purpose of illuminating lessons in how we should act. Relatively simple story lines are embellished to make them more interesting, but themes recur. Just as fiction employs commonly recurring literary devices, so it seems that even complex corporate fraud can be reduced to familiar tropes: a wall of inventory piled […]
In a recent case involving a company called Omnicare, the U.S. Supreme Court made its first significant analysis of liability for opinions expressed by an issuer of securities in a public offering. Such expressions of opinion are a wheeze frequently resorted to by issuers and the deal team’s lawyers when the issuer wants to make a statement in its prospectus […]
A couple of weeks ago the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed insider trading convictions in which the US government had prosecuted portfolio managers (PMs) at hedge funds (Diamondback Capital Management and Level Global Investors) and investment firms for trading on confidential information they had received from their analysts. The court tightened the standard for prosecution and […]
In May 2013, Chesapeake Energy Corp (CHK), the second largest U.S. natural gas company, won a case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that lifted US$117 million from event-driven noteholders’ pockets when the price crashed, but as of the appeals court decision two weeks ago, now looks less certain of the outcome relating to […]