The last two months have seen the issuance of several awards from both the SEC and CFTC. As is often the case, these awards underscore the importance of timely disclosures.
Award Summary:
In March of 2024, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, on behalf of the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), announced a new, three-year Corporate Whistleblower Award Pilot Program (the “Pilot Program”), designed to incentivize and reward certain individuals who report corporate wrongdoing. This is the DOJ’s first whistleblower reward program.
The Pilot Program took effect on August
On February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Murray v. UBS Securities LLC, et al., siding with whistleblower Trevor Murry in holding that whistleblowers seeking protection from retaliation under federal law needn’t show retaliatory intent on the part of their employers.
The case analyzed the retaliation provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of
Last Wednesday, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (“SDNY”) announced the launch of a whistleblower pilot program, designed to proactively uncover criminal conduct in the Southern District. As described in the press release, the program is designed to “encourage[] early and voluntary self-disclosure of criminal conduct by individual participants”
Over the last several months, we have been working behind the scenes to put together a database of final award orders issued by the SEC and CFTC. While the project remains a work-in-progress, it is at the stage where it seems others might benefit from access.
We undertook this project, in part, to make our
Last Friday, the SEC announced that the agency had settled charges against D.E. Shaw & Co. LP, a New-York based investment advisor. Since 2011, and through at least 2019, D.E. Shaw had been in habit of requiring employees to sign agreements prohibiting the disclosure of confidential corporate information to third parties. These agreements did not
A question that we are occasionally asked concerns attorneys as whistleblowers. It’s a reasonable question—who is better positioned to know whether their employer (for in-house counsel) or client (external counsel) is following the rules? But with knowledge comes duty, and the prospect of attorney-whistleblowers raises the specter of conflicts of interest in a way that
On May 30, 2023, the Supreme Court declined to review a challenge to an SEC award decision brought by an anonymous attorney who blew the whistle on a foreign bribery scheme. (Case No. 22-963.) The decision comes after the Second Circuit denied the whistleblower’s petition for review of the SEC’s order in November 2022,
In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the last two weeks have seen the imposition of several rounds of sanctions against Russian and Belarussian individuals, banks, and other business. How effective these sanctions are will depend entirely on their enforcement, and this is an area where whistleblowers have the potential to play an outsized
