A federal appeals court Friday upheld the 2009 conviction and 50-year prison sentence of Minnesota businessman Tom Petters, who was found guilty of orchestrating a $3.7 billion Ponzi scheme. The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Petters got a fair trial. A three-judge panel rejected defense claims that the U.S. District Judge Richard […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to take the unprecedented step of suing the agency that insures U.S. brokerage accounts to force it to pay victims of Allen Stanford’s alleged $7 billion Ponzi scheme. The SEC plans to sue the Securities Investor Protection Corp. as early as Monday or Tuesday to compel a liquidation […]
Bank of New York Mellon Corp., as the indenture trustee for holders of the county’s sewer warrants, asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thomas B. Bennett in Birmingham, Alabama, to throw the biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy out of court, where the county is protected from creditors. Bank of New York Mellon argues that Jefferson County wasn’t authorized to file […]
On December 5, 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged four Chinese citizens and a Chinese-based entity with insider trading and obtained an emergency court order to freeze their assets after they reaped more than $2.7 million in profits by trading in advance of a recent public announcement of a merger agreement between London-based Pearson […]
On November 30, 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed an enforcement action under seal in federal court in Washington D.C. and obtained an emergency court order to halt a prime bank scheme that defrauded at least 13 investors out of more than $2 million since August 2010. The Court unsealed the action on December […]