Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
You'd think that a corporation would have to have some gall if it sued its officers and directors for prolonging its life.
Even if they defrauded lenders out of the money that kept the firm chugging far past the point of genuine insolvency.
Does the situation change if the company ends up in chapter 11 and the bankruptcy…
If you've tired of hearing campaign promises about tax cuts, repeal of tax cuts, extension of tax cuts, tax cuts for the middle class, tax cuts for income over $250,000 a year, and the like — relax. Let Blawgletter tell you about an entirely other subject: tax avoidance.
And not just any kind of tax…
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court twice took a narrow view of liability under federal law for fraudulent conduct.
In one case, the Court held that section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 doesn't apply to overseas purchases and sales of securities. That the fraud started in or affected the U.S. didn't defeat the…
John Kenneth Galbraith — the Harvard econ prof who sailed with the Kennedys, coined phrases (e.g., "conventional wisdom"), and adored big words — looked back at The Great Crash 1929 (1954) a quarter-century later and found much frenzy to marvel at and folly to lament.
One of his chapters he titled "In Goldman, Sachs We …
Blawgletter's favorite Bloomberg columnist, Jonathan Weil, today takes keyboard in hand to tell us why the Securities and Exchange Commission just sued Goldman Sachs for civil fraud – "Goldman Serves One Master Better Than the Others". He teases with this:
Who knew the folks at the SEC still had it in them to accuse
…
On Monday, the Second Circuit reversed dismissal of a securities fraud case against Smith Barney/Citigroup for misleading mutual fund investors about the true cost of "transfer agent" services, for which the mutual funds paid an outside vendor. After a few years, the transfer agent, at SmithBarneyCitigroup's request, started rebating most of the fees to SmithBarney/Citigroup. SmithBarney/Citigroup…
Blawgletter laments that most cases involving the worst instances of fraud suffer from a sad but inexorable fact: the victims' money has vanished.
Just ask the people who trusted their savings to Bernie Madoff, for instance.
Judges (and, occasionally, juries) struggle with competing urges in such cases. On the one hand, they want to find a way to right the wrong. …
The Fifth Circuit kept itself busy last week with Texas fraudulent inducement cases, in which Innocent Person accused Lying Person of fibbing to get IP to sign a contract with LP.
In one appeal (see post), a panel held as a matter of law that a false representation in a contract didn't count as a misrepresentation at…
The subprime residential mortgage business got much of its lending money from big banks. Wall Street in turn acquired the cash by pooling thousands of subprime mortgages into securities and selling the paper to investors.
In 2007, Lone Star bought $61 million of such securities from Barclays Bank and Barclays Capital. The deal documents…
Yesterday, the Supreme Court peppered Merck's lawyer with hot questions. Before he started, at least, the advocate likely harbored hope that he could convince Their Honors that the two-year statute of limitations under 28 U.S.C. 1658(b) starts running before the plaintiff could have alleged enough facts to survive a motion to dismiss under the tough pleading standards of Bell Atl. Corp.