Posts Tagged ‘SEC enforcement’
SEC Warning on Insider Stock Sales
Two top officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission warned this week that companies should pay more heed to the policies they use to govern senior executives’ stock sales, to prevent even the appearance of impropriety when an executive is selling shares. The comments came from Bill Hinman, director of the Division of Corporation Finance,…
Read MoreSEC Charges Wells Fargo Execs
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two former top executives at Wells Fargo with misleading investors about the bank’s financial performance — the latest chapter in the endless saga of regulators trying to hold Wells Fargo folks accountable for the bank’s disastrously bad behavior. The SEC charged John Stumpf, who had been CEO of…
Read MoreSEC Dings Two Firms on Internal Controls
For years regulators have talked about the importance of data analytics in enforcement actions. Now the SEC has demonstrated that point with two enforcement actions for poor internal control and earnings manipulation, driven by the agency’s in-house analytics team. So we can’t say nobody warned us. The enforcement actions were announced Monday, against a carpet…
Read MoreENI Settles FCPA Case for $24.5M
You all may have been at a Zoom virtual happy hour on Friday afternoon, but not the folks at the SEC Division of Enforcement! They quietly settled an FCPA case with Italian energy firm ENI that nicked the company for $24.5 million. In some ways the case is ho-hum. In the late 2000s an ENI…
Read MoreCourt Treads Carefully on SEC Disgorgement
The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday about the disgorgement powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The justices seemed to be looking for some way to keep the SEC’s powers alive, even if the agency might need to be more constrained in how it pursues disgorgement. The case, Liu v. SEC, isn’t likely to see…
Read MoreCardinal Pays $8.8 Million on FCPA Issues
The Securities and Exchange Commission has served up its first FCPA enforcement action of the year, an $8.8 million slap against Cardinal Health for failing to address bribery risks caused by a cosmetics business Cardinal ran in China. What happened? In November 2010, Cardinal entered the Chinese market by acquiring the Chinese subsidiaries of an…
Read MoreWells Fargo, Part III: Mundane Securities Stuff
Today we get more pedestrian with Wells Fargo and its unauthorized accounts scandal. Sure, the misconduct was egregious and leadership was a disgrace — but how, precisely, did Wells Fargo violate securities law and get a $500 million wallop from the SEC? By sketchy use of non-financial metrics. You almost have to laugh. Wells Fargo…
Read MoreDiageo Lessons on Internal Control
Talk about going on a bender: the SEC just fined spirits maker Diageo $5 million for forcing its distributors to buy more liquor than they needed, and then neglecting to tell investors that Diageo’s inflated sales numbers would eventually dry out. In the world of funny numbers, what Diageo did is known as channel stuffing,…
Read MoreSecurities Enforcement Forum 2019
Several hundred securities enforcement professionals gathered in Washington on Wednesday for the 2019 Securities Enforcement Forum. Radical Compliance couldn’t be there in person, so we gathered a bundle of dispatches from social media to give a flavor of what was discussed. After all, when under SEC investigation, you want the experience to be as enjoyable…
Read MoreGraphics Firm Draws $10M FCPA Settlement
A global printing and graphics business based in Wisconsin has agreed to pay $10 million to settle FCPA charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in an eye-popping case with misconduct that included bribes to judges, sales to Cuba, and just about every corporate compliance mistake a company could make. The company in question is…
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