On November 6, 2019, the SEC Division of Enforcement published its annual report for fiscal year 2019. The report provides valuable insight, not only as to the Division’s performance over the past year, but also about its current priorities and where it will be focused in the near-term future. Overall, Enforcement’s program since 2017, when SEC Chairman Jay Clayton assumed leadership of the agency, has been shaped by five “core principles”: (1) focus on the retail investor;… More
Monthly Archives: November 2019
SEC Continues to Seek Disgorgement Despite a Looming Supreme Court Case that Could Invalidate the Practice
On November 6, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil complaint, captioned SEC v. Pierre, against a New York investment advisor for allegedly operating a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. The SEC alleges that the defendant promised investors unreasonably high rates of return (20 percent every 60 days) and that he paid those investors, in the face of significant losses, with money from new investors.… More
Supreme Court to Decide Whether SEC Can Disgorge
The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to decide whether the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission can seek and obtain disgorgement from a court as a remedy for a securities violation. A decision that the SEC does not have disgorgement authority would have significant consequences for litigants.
In SEC v. Liu, a California District Court held that the defendants had defrauded Chinese individuals seeking to invest in a cancer treatment center to obtain visas under the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program.… More
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: DOJ’s Pursuit of Alleged Drug Co-Pay Kickbacks Extends to the Charities Themselves
Back in May, we wrote about substantial settlements totaling $125 million to resolve Department of Justice (DOJ) allegations that money donated by Astellas Pharma US, Inc. and Amgen Inc. to drug co-pay charities constituted illegal kickbacks under the False Claims Act (FCA). At the time, we noted that the settlements were the seventh and eighth such resolutions in the District of Massachusetts since December 2017,… More
Biotech CEO Convicted of Securities Fraud and Obstructing SEC Investigation
The chief executive of a Boston-based biotech company, Frank Reynolds, was convicted of defrauding investors and obstructing an SEC investigation. Reynolds founded the biopharma startup PixarBio Corp. in 2013 and took the company public in 2016. By the next year PixarBio was in a tailspin and an SEC probe was opened. Reynolds is now facing possible jail time and millions in fines after he stoked the brief meteoric rise of PixarBio with promises of ground breaking inventions,… More