These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.
Mathew Martoma’s Wife Fights to Keep Couple’s Florida Home, Millions in Cashby Bruce Carton in Compliance Week
Martoma will begin serving his prison term next month, but his wife, Rosemary Martoma, is now challenging the $9.4 million forfeiture order. This week Rosemary Martoma asked the court to allow her to keep her share of the couple’s assets–including a $2.2 million home in Boca Raton, Florida and approximately $4.5 million in cash.
The New Vocabulary of Compliance Communications by Joel A. Rogers in Communicating Compliance
Every time there is a paradigm shift in any arena, a new vocabulary – either new words or new meanings to older words – emerges to account for a host of novel concepts. … The same thing is true in compliance, as I learned in the reader comments to my last blog post, in which I made reference to “low-bandwidth” compliance communications, a term which caused confusion for at least one reader. As the paradigm of compliance communications shifts away from long, burdensome elearning programs toward quick bursts of information delivered in an organized, structured fashion, a new vocabulary has emerged to account for its conceptual differences from “traditional” practices.
SEC Whistleblower Program Achieves Critical Mass by Matt T. Morley in the HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
Two recent Dodd-Frank whistleblower awards suggest that the program is becoming the kind of “game changer” for law enforcement that many had predicted. The program, which took effect in August 2011, mandates the payment of bounties to persons who voluntarily provide information leading to a successful securities enforcement action in which more than $1 million is recovered. Informants are entitled to receive between 10 and 30 percent of the amounts recovered, with the precise amount to be determined by the SEC.
Complicating Sanctions Compliance: OFAC Redefines 50 Percent Rule by Michael Volkov in Corruption, Crime & Compliance
OFAC’s revised policy addresses the ownership requirement under which a person related to an SDN has to be blocked under OFAC regulations. Going back around six years ago, OFAC adopted a policy that ownership for purposes of sanctions extends to any entity that is 50 percent or more owned by a single SDN.
The Second Time Around Analyst Is Charged With Insider Trading by Thomas O. Gordon in SEC Actions
The second time around proved to be the undoing of a senior financial analyst at a pharmaceutical company identified only as Pharma Co. Two years ago he supposedly furnished material non-public information about a proposed take-over to his longtime friend, identified as Trader. Trader traded and profited. No action was brought. In 2014 the analyst supposedly furnished the same friend inside information on another transaction. This time the SEC and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney filed civil and criminal charges against the analyst. SEC v. Zwerko, Civil Action No. CV 8181 (S.D.N.Y. Filed Oct. 10, 2014).
