Last month, Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn) and his co-sponsors, Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) and Denny Heck (D-WA), introduced H.R. 2534:  The Insider Trading Prohibition Act.  Unlike its substantially similar predecessor, H.R. 1625, which was introduced by Representative Himes on March 25, 2015, H.R. 2534 has gained some momentum in the U.S. House of Representatives, having been unanimously approved by the Financial Services Committee in May 2019.  Although the bill is only at the preliminary…

On June 17, 2019, in a decision interpreting the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause, the United States Supreme Court in Gamble v. United States upheld the doctrine of dual-sovereignty.[1]  In doing so, the Court confirmed that one sovereign may prosecute a defendant under its laws even if another sovereign has already prosecuted the defendant for the same conduct, notwithstanding the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against multiple prosecutions for the “same offence.”[2]  While Gamble does…

In the past year, members of the U.S. Congress and Senate on both sides of the aisle have proposed data privacy bills that would impose nationwide standards on companies who collect and/or share consumers’ personal information. Currently, all 50 states have separate, but often overlapping, data privacy regimes—each subjecting companies to various combinations of recordkeeping standards, data sharing restrictions, and data breach reporting requirements—creating a patchwork of state laws that can generate substantial uncertainty for…

On May 2, 2019, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued an important decision delineating the boundaries between conducting a proper internal investigation and acting as an arm of the government. For the government, the consequences of “outsourcing” an investigation to a company and its counsel could be exclusion of evidence collected as a result of that internal investigation, including statements made by a company employee in an interview,…

Nearly a decade ago, WikiLeaks ushered in the age of mass leaks.  Since then, corporations, governments, public figures and private entities have increasingly had to reckon with a new reality: that vigilantes, activists, extortionists and even state actors can silently steal and rapidly disseminate proprietary information, including customer data and other sensitive information.  Last month, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) indicted four individuals based on information first revealed in the “Panama Papers” leak.  This marks…

As discussed in Cleary Gottlieb’s December 21, 2018 Alert Memorandum, on December 18, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an important ruling in In re Grand Jury Subpoena, holding, inter alia, that foreign state-owned corporations are subject to criminal jurisdiction in the United States and upholding Special Counsel Mueller’s authority to serve and enforce a grand jury subpoena on a sovereign entity. The foreign state-owned corporation subsequently sought…

On January 11, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal of Rajat Gupta, who was seeking to undo his insider trading conviction.  Relying on the Second Circuit’s decision in United States v. Newman, Gupta argued that—to satisfy the requirement that Gupta personally benefit from tipping inside information—the Government must show “a quid pro quo – in which [Gupta] receive[d] an ‘objective, consequential . . . gain of a pecuniary or similarly valuable nature.’”…