SEC Charges JP Morgan for Mistakenly Deleting 47 Million Electronic Records

JPMorgan Mistakenly Deleted 47 Million Records, SEC Alleges

IJPMorgan Chase & Co. will pay a $4 million fine to settle Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that the bank mistakenly deleted millions of electronic records, leaving communications unavailable to regulators in a dozen investigations.

The SEC alleged Thursday that JPMorgan Securities permanently deleted 47 million electronic records, including emails and instant messages, from January 2018 to April 2018. As a result, the regulator said that JPMorgan could not come up with requested documents in eight SEC investigations and four other regulatory probes. The SEC didn’t say whether those actions were focused on the bank.

An IPO for a Painting? This $55 Million Masterpiece Is Going Public

A company named Artex is launching a roughly $55 million initial public offering of Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” painted shortly after the couple met in 1963. Shares in the portrait will be sold for around $100 a piece and will list on a specially created art stock exchange based in Liechtenstein, giving regular investors the ability to buy and sell shares in a famous artwork on a stock exchange for the first time.

Shadow Trading

The question that interests me here is: What is the denominator? Was Panuwat the first person ever to notice that, when he got inside information about his company, he could use it to trade other companies’ stocks? No, absolutely not, tons of my readers have also noticed that, and they keep writing to me about it. Was Panuwat the first person ever to actually do it? That I do not know; perhaps my readers are curious theoreticians but uniformly law-abiding.

But what evidence there is suggests that, no, lots of people have done this. After the Panuwat case, we discussed a paper by Mihir Mehta, David Reeb and Wanli Zhao, which named this phenomenon — using inside information about one company to trade a correlated stock — “shadow trading,” and which found statistical evidence that it is pretty widespread. Earlier this year, we discussed another paper finding evidence of shadow trading using exchange-traded funds. If shadow trading happens all the time and the SEC has brought one enforcement action, well, I leave the math as an exercise for the reader. This is not any sort of advice about anything!

Binance Hires Former DOJ Prosecutor M. Kendall Day in SEC Fight

The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance Holdings Ltd., has hired a former white-collar prosecutor at the Department of Justice to represent the firm in the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit, according to a court filing on Thursday.

M. Kendall Day will appear in the SEC case as counsel for Binance, the filing said. The partner in the Washington DC office of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher was the former acting deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, where he worked for 15 years, according to his biography on the Gibson Dunn website.

Goldman Banker’s Insider Trading Guilty Verdict Sealed by Former Friend

The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. veteran aimed a deadpan stare at his friend on the witness stand and waited for the inevitable betrayal.

Yes, the witness said, he knew the defendant, and pointed to the former Goldman banker, a few yards away. He was his classmate, his groomsman, his squash partner and wingman – and the author of an insider-trading scheme that had now upended both of their lives.

Brijesh Goel, in a blue tie at the defense table, didn’t flinch. But by the time that testimony was over, the verdict was assured.

How Effective Is SEC Rule 10b5-1 In Deterring Insider Trading?

This study should be of interest to corporate governance policy groups and regulators who are focused on limiting the ability of managers of public corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of their firm’s stockholders. The results suggest that some CEOs successfully exploit weaknesses in the Rule 10b5-1 framework for personal gain.

U.S. SEC to Forego $30M BlockFi Fine to Maximize and Speed Up Investor Repayment

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has agreed to forego a $30 million fine from bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi until after investors are repaid, a court filing from Thursday shows.

The sum is what’s left over from a $50 million penalty owed to the SEC by BlockFi to settle charges of failing to register with the regulator for the offering and sale of its crypto lending product. The platform agreed to the settlement in February 2022 but filed for bankruptcy in November following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.