Coinbase's Effort to Subpoena SEC Chair Gensler Hits Roadblock

Judge Sends Coinbase Back to the Drawing Board Over Efforts to Subpoena SEC’s Gary Gensler

The judge took specific issue with Coinbase requesting documents from Gensler predating his term as chair of the regulatory agency. Kevin Schwartz, an attorney with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz representing Coinbase, said the agency has refused to even discuss the totality of the documents Coinbase might have, but that Gensler’s communications were relevant to the case.

Jorge Tenreiro, an SEC senior trial attorney, said Gensler’s communications before he became chair of the agency were not relevant to the case, adding that the SEC chair is neither a fact nor expert witness in the case and could set a concerning precedent in future cases.

Near the end of the hearing, the judge told Schwartz that she had “strong views” on the value of Gensler’s statements from before he took the reins at the federal agency and that she was still leaning toward the SEC’s view that the requests were inappropriate.

Billions on the line in fee fight over Musk pay

It’s hard to overstate the stakes for the lawyers who persuaded a Delaware judge to void Tesla founder’s Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package.

The size of the legal fee they are requesting is undoubtedly vast: more than 29 million Tesla shares, valued at $7.74 billion as of Thursday morning’s market opening. And so is the gulf between that sum and what Tesla – and many of its investors – think the lawyers may actually deserve for their work on behalf of a lone shareholder client.

“No one has identified a single instance of lawyers collecting that kind of money for a lawsuit. Ever,” Tesla argued in court papers ahead of a hearing on the fee earlier this week.

The car marker is asking instead for a fee award as low as $13.6 million for the plaintiff’s lawyers at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, Andrews & Springer, and Friedman Oster & Tejtel….

Bill Hwang

From the beginning, the mystery of Bill Hwang is that there has never been any real evidence that he had a plan to make money. He bought stocks, he pushed them up, he had paper profits, he had capacity to withdraw or borrow against some of those paper profits, and he plowed basically all of them back into buying more of the same stocks. He never took his foot off the gas; he was pouring more money into those stocks the week they all collapsed. I have speculated that it would be cool if at some point he withdrew a billion dollars of profits and buried them in his backyard, but even after the trial I have never seen any evidence of that. “What was in it for him,” the judge asked before the trial, and I don’t think there was ever really an answer.

It doesn’t matter! Manipulating stocks for no reason is illegal, just like manipulating them for profit would be. It’s just narratively unsatisfying.

SEC Ends Probe Into Paxos Over Binance USD Token

The Securities and Exchange Commission has ended its investigation into Paxos Trust in relation to Binance USD, a digital asset that Paxos issues and lists, the cryptocurrency platform said Thursday.

Paxos said it received a formal termination notice on Tuesday from the SEC, saying it won’t recommend taking an enforcement action against the firm over BUSD, a Binance-branded stablecoin pegged to the dollar on a one-to-one ratio.

Government Whistleblower and Compliance Programs Share Same Goals

Whistleblower programs and companies’ internal compliance processes aren’t in competition for information from whistleblowers. Counsel representing individuals who participate in government whistleblower programs understand that such a conclusion has it all wrong.

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According to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fiscal year 2017 annual report to Congress on its whistleblower program, about 62% of award recipients from fiscal years 2012 to 2017 were current or former insiders of the entities they reported about. Of these, nearly 83% raised their concerns internally to supervisors, compliance personnel, or through internal reporting mechanisms before reporting to the SEC.

Similarly, an analysis of nine years of data on Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblowers found that over 90% of those who brought retaliation cases had reported internally first.