Here are recent compliance related stories from the past week:
In case you missed it:
Its Official: Recession Ended June 2009 by Barry Ritholtz in The Big Picture
The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met yesterday by conference call. At its meeting, the committee determined that a trough in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in June 2009. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in December 2007 and the beginning of an expansion. The recession lasted 18 months, which makes it the longest of any recession since World War II.
Reading the Fifth Circuit Opinion Reinstating the Mark Cuban Case by Professor Bainbridge
So the court is not resolving the difficult legal issues posed by the Cuban case, which we have explored many times before. Instead, they start by reading the “complaint in the light most favorable to the SEC” and then concluding that the complaint’s “allegations, taken in their entirety, provide more than a plausible basis to find that the understanding between the CEO and Cuban was that he was not to trade, that it was more than a simple confidentiality agreement.” I find this rather curious. If the law is, as I believe it to be, that a mere agreement not to trade is an insufficient basis for imposing insider trading liability, then shouldn’t the question of what Cuban did or did not do in that regard be irrelevant?
Expand The Corporate Miranda Warning by the FCPA Blog
On her way to be interviewed by her employer’s outside lawyers about alleged overseas corruption, Rose Carson, the government says, stopped by the ladies room and flushed some relevant documents down the toilet. Because of that, she’s charged with obstructing a federal investigation under 18 U.S.C.§ 1519, which carries up to 20 years in jail. Did anyone warn her that concealing information from company lawyers conducting an internal FCPA investigation could be a federal crime?
Default Rate Nears ’08 Level by Mike Spector in the Wall Street Journal
The great debt storm has passed. And the damage is a lot less than feared. Corporate debt-default rates are expected to fall to the same levels that preceded the financial crisis of September 2008, marking a swift turnaround for the fate of the most troubled U.S. companies.
