DOGE Reportedly Leaving the SEC This Week

DOGE to leave top US markets regulator, sources say

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, or DOGE, has wrapped up work at the Securities and Exchange Commission and will exit the agency this week, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

The group, originally led by billionaire Elon Musk, has overseen massive job cuts across the federal government since Trump, a Republican, took office in January. At the SEC, DOGE staff mostly focused on slashing contracts before turning to pushing for deregulation, Reuters has previously reported.

BlackRock Stung by Loans to Business Accused of ‘Breathtaking’ Fraud

BlackRock’s private-credit investing arm and other lenders are trying to recover hundreds of millions of dollars after falling victim to what they called a “breathtaking” fraud, marking another breakdown in an opaque corner of the U.S. debt markets.

The lenders have accused Bankim Brahmbhatt, the owner of little-known telecom-services companies Broadband Telecom and Bridgevoice, of fabricating accounts receivable that were supposed to be used as loan collateral. The lenders filed suit in August. They said Brahmbhatt’s companies owe them more than $500 million.

Brahmbhatt disputes the allegations of fraud, his lawyer said.

If the SEC wants to fight fraud, icing out whistleblowers isn’t the way

With the SEC issuing five awards over several days surrounding Labor Day, however, the agency seemed to be signaling it remains firmly behind the program. That signal grew even stronger with the SEC issuing another five awards just before the shutdown, four of them only a few hours before the government went dark.

But this recent wave of awards, coupled with the agency’s other whistleblower activity (and inactivity), actually send a more muddled message on where the SEC really stands with its whistleblower program.

An important contributor to this mixed message is the unusually paltry payouts from the SEC’s recent whistleblower awards. These awards are nowhere near the hundreds of millions of dollars the agency doled out to whistleblowers in each of the past five years. In fact, two of the most recent awards were for no money at all.

This raises the serious specter that the SEC may be shying away from the blockbuster awards that have become a hallmark of the program….

This 🚀 Can Cause Trouble as Emojis Help Prove Securities Fraud

A veteran in-house lawyer recently joked that she needed to “up her emoji game” just to keep pace with her company’s younger workforce. It was a light moment—until she added that emojis were showing up in investigations and litigation with increasing frequency, often with serious consequences.

For compliance officers and in-house counsel, these tiny symbols can create big problems; for prosecutors and plaintiffs’ lawyers, they’re gold. A growing body of cases show how text messages using emojis are being used to prove intent, misconduct, and liability in high-stakes securities litigation and enforcement actions.

An Influencer’s Interview With Snowflake’s CRO Triggered an 8K Filing

There are countless videos of financial advice on TikTok. Only rarely does one end up in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Data-storage company Snowflake filed an 8-K with the SEC on Monday after an executive spoke to an influencer who posts under the account name “theschoolofhardknockz” on Instagram and TikTok. Though the filing doesn’t name the executive, he identifies himself as Chief Revenue Officer Mike Gannon in the video, which had more than 555,000 views on TikTok and nearly 138,000 likes on Instagram as of Wednesday afternoon.

The filing said that the executive made statements about Snowflake’s future financial results, but is “not a designated spokesperson authorized to disclose financial information on behalf of the Company.” Companies file 8-Ks to announce significant events that shareholders need to know.

In the video taken outside the New York Stock Exchange, Gannon said that Snowflake will exit the year with just over $4.5 billion in revenue and that “we’re getting to $10 billion in a couple of years.”

Investors, Monday’s filing noted, “should not rely upon such statements.”