Senator Paul S. Sarbanes passed away peacefully on the evening of December 6, 2020, according to a statement released by the office of his son, U.S. Representative John Sarbanes (D-Md.).1 Sarbanes will be best remembered by most Americans for the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002,2 which sought to improve transparency and accountability for publicly traded companies in the wake of the accounting scandal that led to the largest bankruptcy to date of Enron Corporation in…

A recent alert by Jamie Gottlieb Furia in Lowenstein Sandler’s White Collar Criminal Defense practice discusses the jury’s verdict against two former MiMedx Group Inc. executives for their involvement in an alleged fraud scheme. The three-week trial before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff marked the first white-collar jury trial in the Southern District of New York since March, when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Read the alert here.…

In the most recent development in Cohen v. Capital One Funding LLC [1], a case seeking to certify a class asserting that New York State’s usury laws can apply to securitized credit card debts, Capital One-affiliated defendants have prevailed in their efforts to have the claims dismissed.  Plaintiffs sought to apply New York’s statutory caps on interest charges of 16 percent (civil) [2] and 25 percent (criminal) [3] to interest payments on credit cards issued…

Last week, Judge Naomi Buchwald of the Southern District of New York provided final approval of a nearly $22 million settlement between a class of indirect investors and five Wall Street banks that the plaintiff investors accused of manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) in violation of the Sherman Act. The plaintiffs are over-the-counter (OTC) investors who indirectly interacted with the defendant banks via interest rate swaps and other transactions. These plaintiffs made purchases…

In a previous post, we discussed Kirschner v. JPMorgan Chase Bank,[1] an action in which the trustee of bankrupt Millennium Labs brought state law securities fraud claims on behalf of a group of “approximately 400 mutual funds, pension funds, universities, [CLO]s and other institutional investors,” against banks that organized a $1.765 billion syndicated loan. The threshold issue faced by the court was whether an investor’s share of a syndicated loan qualifies as a “security”…

As cryptocurrency and blockchain technology have expanded, so too have regulatory scrutiny and ensuing litigation. The lack of a uniformly applicable regulatory framework–particularly regarding whether virtual currencies constitute securities subject to the federal securities laws and registration requirements–has led to confusion and uncertainty. Recently filed “fintech” actions are poised to establish precedent in this novel legal landscape. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Enforcement Division’s recently created cyber unit investigated and recommended the commission bring…