Court Rules Covington Must Identify Seven Public Company Clients in Hacking Case

US court orders law firm Covington to name some clients for SEC probe

Covington & Burling must identify some clients caught up in a 2020 hack on the law firm to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge in Washington ruled on Monday in a case that could impact future cyberattack investigations.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ordered Covington to give the SEC the names of seven public company clients that may have had information relevant to investors accessed or stolen, dealing a partial victory to the financial regulator in its probe of the attack.

A spokesperson for Covington said the firm will “review the decision carefully and consider any next steps in consultation with our affected clients.”

Judge in FTX Case Orders Gag on Contact with Media

A federal judge is considering forbidding “parties and witnesses” in the FTX case from speaking to the media, days after the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried leaked private documents from one of his co-conspirators to the press, according to court filings.

The proposed order, filed Monday, comes as the DOJ claims Bankman-Fried shared former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison’s private diary to obstruct a “fair trial.” Ellison and Bankman-Fried had also been in a relationship at the time of the alleged crimes.

“The parties in this case, their attorneys, and their agents are prohibited from publicly disseminating or discussing with any public communications media anything about the case which could interfere with a fair trial,” the proposed order said.

Everything is securities fraud

If a beer company sends beer to a transgender influencer and right-wing influencers get mad about it and boycott the beer, is that securities fraud? Buddy everything is … well, technically this is a shareholder derivative action for breach of fiduciary duty, and more technically it’s just a guy talking about a shareholder derivative action, but still here you go:

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is urging the state’s pension fund manager to consider legal action against Bud Light’s parent company amid conservative backlash to the beermaker’s recent marketing efforts, the latest attempt by the Republican presidential candidate to inject himself and the state he runs into the country’s culture wars.

In a Thursday letter obtained by CNN, DeSantis suggests AB InBev ‘breached legal duties owed to its shareholders’ when it decided to associate with ‘radical social ideologies….’”

US Dismisses Charges Against ‘King of Political Intelligence’

US prosecutors and a man known as “King of Political Intelligence” for allegedly passing secret government information to traders arrived at an agreement under which securities fraud charges against him will be dropped.

As long as David Blaszczak, a Washington consultant and former Medicare official, complies with the deferred prosecution agreement for three months, the US intends to dismiss two remaining charges it could have retried him on after appeals courts threw out earlier convictions, prosecutors told US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in a letter filed late Monday.

UBS Is Fined Nearly $400 Million in Credit Suisse’s Archegos Mess

UBS will pay $387 million in fines to clean up lingering messes at Credit Suisse, the wounded Swiss banking rival it acquired this year.

The fines, issued concurrently by regulators in the United States and Britain, are related to Credit Suisse’s acknowledged “fundamental failure of management and controls” in 2020 and 2021, which led to a $5.5 billion loss in the collapse of a single client, the investment firm Archegos Capital Management. That incident helped shatter confidence in the 166-year-old Credit Suisse and foretold its eventual absorption into UBS.

Former US prison employee to admit to accepting payments from Rajaratnam -source

Starting in 2018, Tidwell began receiving undisclosed benefits from Rajaratnam and a close friend and business associate of Rajaratnam, according to charging papers and the person familiar with the matter.

Those benefits included $25,000 to help pay off loans for a family member and more than $65,000 in fees and other benefits stemming from an agreement to help manage certain properties, including one Tidwell lived at, prosecutors said.

During this time, Tidwell showed favoritism to the wealthy inmate by delaying his transfer from a coveted unit within the prison where inmates had more privacy and allowing him to set up legal calls more easily than other inmates, prosecutors said.

He Went to Prison for Crypto Crime. Now He’s an Advocate for Compliance

As crypto entrepreneurs such as FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried and former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky face criminal allegations of misconduct and possibly prison time, one of the Justice Department’s earliest collars has a message for today’s players: Get compliant.

Charlie Shrem was an early apostle of cryptocurrency, earning millions of dollars trading bitcoin and treated like a rock star worldwide, with fans at conferences snapping photos of him and pushing business cards at him. But the one-time chief executive and compliance officer of BitInstant went to prison in 2015 for a drug scheme involving the bitcoin exchange he co-founded and an online black market, making Shrem one of the first in the U.S. to get jail time for crimes connected to crypto.

Today, the 33-year-old says he is mining his experience and urging the latest generation of crypto companies to erect guardrails against corporate misconduct.