The Criminal Lawyer

We’ve written about an upcoming wave of white-collar prosecutions, especially against Wall Street types. But wait, there’s more: the feds are now about to start prosecuting doctors.

The Department of Justice and the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services are about to start prosecuting physicians who receive inappropriate incentives from manufacturers and sellers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Doctors who have accepted such incentives face criminal prosecution, as well as civil fines and being barred from participation in Medicare and Medicaid programs. Doctors who have received significant incentives from medical marketers might want to seriously consider consulting a good white-collar defense attorney.

Of course, incentives are a commonplace in medical marketing. And of course the purpose is to somehow influence which drug a doctor intends to prescribe, or what equipment a doctor uses. A wide range of incentives are offered, not just the free pens, prescription pads and trinkets routinely handed out. Expensive equipment can be provided for free or at a deep discount, in return for minimal obligations such as a product recommendation or letting one’s office be used (albeit rarely) as a training facility. In extreme cases, sellers actually pick up the tab for travel to seminars or other expenses, pay “advances on royalties” for helping develop products, or simply pay cash kickbacks.

In the past, it has usually been the manufacturers who got prosecuted for making kickbacks or bribes, often paying millions in fines and undertaking the supervision of monitors. What’s new now is the federal focus on the doctors themselves, on the receiving end.

Many doctors may not think they’re doing anything wrong by accepting incentives from sales folk. After all, it’s the norm. And so what if a doctor got a free trip to the conference, if he continues to make his prescription decisions independently and based on the actual needs of the individual patient?

The government sees this as criminal partly because such payments are opaque. A patient might not be so trusting of a prescription for FancyPharm if he knew his doctor was getting comped by that company. A patient might not have the same confidence in her eye surgeon if she knew that he didn’t actually select and purchase his laser equipment himself, but instead got it for nothing.

Another reason is the perception that medicines and procedures would be improperly prescribed, because the incentives had an undue influence on the doctor’s decisions. Unnecessary expense and harm could result.

The main tool that prosecutors have here is the federal Anti-Kickback Statute (formally known as “the Medicate and Medicaid Patient Protection Act of 1987,” 42 U.S.C § 1320a-7b). It basically provides up to 5 years imprisonment and $25,000 in fines.

The feds are most likely to go after those who allowed marketers to pay for their consulting fees, travel to seminars or other expenses, or who accepted advances or payments, or who accepted large rebates or extreme discounts without proportionate consideration, or otherwise received remuneration that could have influenced their decision making.

Lewis Morris, chief counsel for the Inspector General, told the New York Times last week that “what we need to do is make examples of a couple of doctors, so that their colleagues see that this isn’t worth it.”

When law enforcement says they are going to make examples of people, one might think that this means they will carefully pick and choose their cases, cherry-picking only the most obviously criminal acts with the strongest evidence. However, in real life, that’s not always the case.

Especially in cases like these, where the evidence tends to be more circumstantial (absent clearly incriminating admissions, recordings or emails), and where the conduct is very often in the gray area of culpability, prosecutors may not have many rock-crusher cases in the first place. And they certainly won’t have enough cases at first to do much cherry-picking in any event.

No, they have announced their desire to make examples of people, and we predict they will go after whatever crosses their desk.

Cases are going to come from marketers who got caught trying to bribe someone else, who are then flipped to inform (and wear a wire) against the other doctors they deal with. Those are the easiest cases for law enforcement to initiate. Other cases may come from third-party complaints or referrals, but those are rare in secret one-on-one deals such as those being investigated here.

If any doctors out there think they might have had dealings with a marketer that could get them in trouble, it might be wise to get counsel from a good white-collar defense attorney sooner rather than later.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at a luncheon with some white-collar defense attorneys, listening to a presentation by the acting U.S. Attorney, Lev Dassin. Mr. Dassin let us know that, although he couldn’t spill any particulars, there are a number of ongoing investigations at the Southern District of New York right now, which he expected to provide a lot of work for us later this year.

He also confirmed our impression that there is a lot of political pressure right now, causing prosecutors and law enforcement to focus more assets on white-collar crime. Many see the current economic downturn as the result of Wall Street skullduggery, so law enforcement is being tasked with doing something about it.

Our biggest fear is that people who did nothing illegal may get caught up in the frenzy to blame people for the recession. A federal criminal investigation is a serious matter, and even people who did nothing wrong can wind up in prison because of how they behaved during the investigation.

Still, a lot of white-collar crime is now coming to light these days, because of the hurting economy. Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent investments are being caught out left and right, as investors start trying to pay bills by cashing out their accounts, only to discover that their money isn’t there.

Furthermore, PricewaterhouseCoopers today published a white paper, “Boom Time for White Collar Crime,” predicting that the economy will cause greater numbers of people to commit white-collar crimes, such as embezzlement and fraud.

PwC partner Andrew Gordon told GAAP web that “sales targets seem ever more out of reach, bonuses are under threat, and people’s reputations and livelihoods are at stake. Together, these can be powerful motives for individuals to cross the line.”

The white paper predicts an increase in specific types of fraud: data theft by criminal organizations, “rogue traders” in corporate finance departments, and fraudulent mis-reporting of business numbers to make companies appear better to investors. The paper also sees more Ponzi schemes and fraudulent investment schemes collapsing as investors try to cash out.

So criminals caused a bad economy which is causing more criminals? That sounds a little simplistic.

Of course, the economy didn’t go south because a few Wall Streeters went around defrauding investors. The economy tanked for a lot of reasons, but mostly because lenders stopped believing they’d get paid back. Institutions with the most leverage — financial institutions particularly — got their margins called and couldn’t get new credit, a deadly combination. No amount of government stimulus would change that, without a condition that capital infusions to lenders must turn into loans. The government didn’t make such conditions, so lenders just hoarded their cash to sit out the storm. The credit market, already dying, was pretty much killed. The U.S. Congress and the new Administration have since then acted fairly consistently to prevent lenders from regaining sufficient confidence to start lubricating the economy again. In modern economics, perception is everything — if you are perceived to have liquidity, even if you are at risk, you will have liquidity (see JPMorgan Chase this time last year), but if you are perceived to be at risk even though you aren’t, your liquidity dries up (see Bear Stearns this time last year). Once lenders start perceiving that they will get their money back, things will start picking up. This crisis of confidence was caused, not by white-collar criminals, but by Clinton-era directives to make mortgages to people who can’t pay them, by borrowers and lending agents who cashed in on the resulting laxness, and by an ever growing house of cards that was destined to collapse.

So the economy didn’t go south because of criminals. Similarly, a worse economy doesn’t necessarily translate into more crimes being committed. People who would steal in bad times would have stolen in good times, too. White-collar types aren’t exactly Jean Valjean, stealing a crust of bread so their families don’t starve. No, white-collar crime requires a combination of opportunity and character traits, neither of which correlate with economic pressures.

What is true, however, is that more white-collar prosecutions are going to happen because an under-informed public and its politicians are screaming for blood. Unfortunately, we do not believe that all prosecutors out there understand the complexities and realities of the financial world well enough to accurately sift the guilty from the merely unlucky. Some innocent people are going to get caught in this ever-widening net.

18 U.S.C. § 1346 expands the definition of mail & wire fraud to include “a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” That’s short and sweet, but what does it mean?

The courts have been left to define the crime for themselves. Unfortunately, they differ wildly in what the theft of honest services means. The Fifth Circuit says it’s only a crime if the deprivation of services was also a crime under state law. The Seventh Circuit says the crime is when someone abuses their position for private gain. The Third Circuit says gain is irrelevant.

In general, they agree that employees and public officials have a duty to act only in the best interest of their employers and constituents. But there are lots of ways to act otherwise, and the courts seem to agree that not all of them ought to be criminalized. There is a spectrum of behavior, ranging from the socially acceptable to the abhorrent. Where the line ought to be drawn is undefined and uncertain.

So the Supreme Court finally had a chance to clear it all up, define what “honest services” means, and give straightforward guidance to the courts and to all the employees and officeholders out there. Sorich v. United States, No. 08-410 came to the Supremes on a cert petition, asking them to define the crime and settle the issue at last. That’s what the Supreme Court likes to do, after all — if the circuits can’t agree, it the Court’s job to define the correct approach.

Instead, the Supremes punted, and denied cert.

Scalia wrote an intense dissent, pointing out that this is precisely the kind of issue that the Court ought to resolve, that the split among the circuits is causing confusion in the law, and that real injustice is resulting. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “quite irresponsible to let the current chaos prevail.” We can’t help but agree.

“If the honest services theory… is taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusion,” Scalia pointed out that all kinds of actions would be criminal. Not all ought to be. “A state legislator’s decision to vote for a bill because he expects it will curry favor with a small minority essential to his reelection,” a perfectly normal and expected aspect of electoral politics, would be a federal crime. “A mayor’s attempt to use the prestige of his office to obtain a restaurant table without a reservation,” a perhaps obnoxious act, but one hardly worthy of punishment, would also be included. “Indeed, it would seemingly cover a salaried employee’s phoning in sick to go to a ball game.”

“What principle it is that separates the criminal breaches, conflicts and misstatements from the obnoxious but lawful ones, remains entirely unspecified.” Failing to define what the crime actually means invites unjust prosecutions by “headline-grabbing prosecutors.” Furthermore, nobody knows if their actions would be considered criminal or not, and “it is simply not fair to prosecute someone for a crime” that won’t be defined until the judge’s ruling that sends him to jail. “How can the public be expected to know what the statute means when the judges and prosecutors themselves do not know, or must make it up as they go along?”

Scalia closed with an excellent dictum, quoting from another useful dissent — that of Hugo Black in Green v. United States, 365 U.S. 301, 309 (1961) — “Bad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with law.” It is truly unfortunate that the Supreme Court has passed on an excellent opportunity to ensure just that.

Gang crime is on the rise, the FBI reports. The politicians and prosecutors, however, are focusing on white-collar crime these days. Here’s a look at why this is happening.

Gang crime seems to have increased, ironically, as a result of improved anti-gang law enforcement in the big cities.

According to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment, street gangs have started expanding more rapidly from urban centers into suburban and rural areas. This has spurred new membership, as fresh populations are opened to gang recruitment. By the end of last year, about a million people were estimated to belong to gangs within the U.S.

One might think that the burbs lack the same social pressures that drive gang membership. Gangs are products of the inner cities, after all, where kids lack fathers to lead them, involved communities to belong to, competent schools to teach them, and opportunities for money and glory. We expect gangs to arise in the inner cities of single moms, apathetic neighbors, dysfunctional schools, government welfare and hopelessness. Suburbia’s not like that, right?

Well, according to the NGTA, drugs drove the expansion. During the 1980s, the suburbs began to become a profitable new market for drug dealers who had previously focused on the urban market. During the 1990s, the huge profits from suburban drug sales caused the street gangs to physically expand their territory, often resulting in violence as urban gangs clashed with local toughs and with each other in the race to occupy the burbs.

Meanwhile, law enforcement started cracking down on gang and drug crime in the cities. It was getting dangerous to operate in NYC, LA and Chicago. Suburban cops, however, just weren’t as much of a concern. The burbs were also seen as safe places to hide from unsuspecting law enforcement, unused to dealing with a gang element.

The combination of weaker opposition from law enforcement, and higher profits from suburban drug users paying “white boy prices,” was a clarion call for gang expansion. It was an irony that improved law enforcement actually resulted in the spread of gang-related crime.

There were other reasons for the spread of gangs into suburban and rural communities, not detailed by the NGTA report. From the author’s own interviews with drug traffickers in the New York area, gangs sometimes followed inner-city populations that had moved out there first. People on government assistance began moving out to places such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania and various towns Upstate along the Hudson River, because a person on welfare could have a nicer quality of life there. Many of them brought with them the quality of life that they were trying to avoid, unfortunately. And those who were drug users brought their demand with them. And so the dealers followed, the gangs followed, and the forces that spurred gang recruitment never went away.

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Despite the spread of violent crime and drug trafficking, however, the FBI is focusing more on white collar crime. White collar crimes certainly are on the rise lately, especially fraud cases.

“We may not be doing as many drug enterprise operations,” Special Agent in Charge Richard Lambert recently said, “so we can focus more on mortgage fraud and corporate fraud problems.”

In just the past month or so, 3000 new FBI positions have been created to combat white collar crime. On top of those new hires, the Senate Banking Committee is preparing a $110 million fund that would hire 500 new FBI agents, 50 new AUSAs, and 100 new SEC agents.

Bill co-sponsor Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stated in the accompanying press release that “our white collar crime divisions are under-staffed, under-funded, and overwhelmed. When a wave of violent crime sweeps through a city, the immediate response is to beef up the police forces, putting more cops on the beat, extending overtime, and making sure the city returns to safety. Our reaction to the financial crisis and the massive and complex financial fraud investigations that loom should be no different.”

Why the rise in white collar cases? It’s not just the economy, stupid.

Sure, people may be tempted to commit crimes in an economic downturn. But this usually applies to people who are on the bottom rungs of the economy. Wall Street types and CEOs don’t start robbing banks just because their net worth slipped a bit.

Instead, white collar crime goes on all the time. What’s changing now is not the number of crimes being committed, as the number of cases being prosecuted. There’s a difference. As Anne van Heerden, head of forensics at KPMG Switzerland told Swissinfo, “I do not believe that the number of cases is growing, but rather the detection rate is increasing.”

Sophisticated financial crimes have always been sexy for law enforcement. What prosecutor didn’t want to convict the next Ivan Boesky, Andy Fastow or Michael Milken? The problem is, they’re hard to catch. The crimes take place on paper, in back rooms, and on golf courses. Not places frequented by cops or detectives. Evidence is often hard to find, and even harder to comprehend if found.

But the new economic downturn — which many see as the direct result of white collar crime — has led to new political pressure to “do something about it.” (At a function last week, we joked with a prominent judge that our white-collar defense practice was recession-proof, to which the judge responded “yes, but your clients caused the recession.”) Elected officials feel that pressure to “do something,” and they start rewarding successful prosecutions, and funding more of them.

So the word has come down from above that white-collar prosecutions are what the chiefs want. And that’s what they’re getting.

Expect to see more.

Yesterday, we observed that there have been a lot of Ponzi schemes coming down lately, and asked what gives? Today, the Wall Street Journal made the same observation, and asked the same question.

Here are some points from the article:

* In 2007, the SEC had brought civil actions from 15 alleged Ponzi schemes. In 2008, they brought 23 such cases. So far this month, they’ve already brought 9. And that doesn’t include all the state-level fraud cases that have come down.

* On the criminal side, there have already been 6 multimillion-dollar fraud cases brought this month.

* Experts say these schemes are being discovered now because of the economic downturn. Investors try to cash out their investments, only to learn that the money’s gone. There’s also less money out there being invested, so the source of cash for these schemes dries up, and the house of cards comes crashing down.

The New York Times also had some similar observations:

* “What is causing them to surface now appears to be a combination of a deteriorating economy and heightened skepticism about outsize returns after the revelations about [Bernie Madoff]. That can scare off new clients and cause longtime investors to demand their money back, which brings the charade tumbling down.”

* The Commodities Futures Trading Association has also experienced a doubling of reported Ponzi schemes in the last year.

* On Thursday last week, Senators Chuck Schumer and Richard Shelby introduced a bill to hire 500 new FBI agents, 50 new AUSAs, and 100 new SEC officials to crack down on these crimes.

Nick Cosmo, the 37-year-old head of Agape World Inc. and Agape Merchant Advance, was arraigned today on charges that he ran a Ponzi scheme that cheated investors out of $370 million since 2006.

The feds allege that about 1,500 investors were promised annual returns of as much as 80%. These huge profits were to come from short-term loans to businesses. Instead of coming from actual profits, however, the complaint states that returns paid to investors actually came from the outlays of subsequent investors.

Investor money went mostly to pay other investors, in a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul setup similar to the Bernie Madoff and seemingly countless other Ponzi schemes hitting the news these days. About $55 million went to pay brokers who brought in the investors. A bunch of cash was allegedly spent on expensive luxuries for Cosmo himself, as well as to pay the restitution ordered in a previous mail fraud conviction. Only about $10 million actually went to the loans that were supposed to be the core investment. The firm also transferred $100 million since 2003 into Cosmo’s futures-trading accounts, of which $80 million was lost. As of last Thursday, said prosecutors, Cosmo’s firms had less than $750,000 in the bank.

Agape World was listed as #73 in Entrepreneur Magazine’s Hot 100 fastest-growing businesses in America. (See its listing, screenshotted above.)

This is just one more in a series of prosecutions that have been coming down lately. Prosecutors are clearly ramping up their focus on financial crimes in the wake of the Bear Stearns meltdown — it’s definitely the sexy crime of the moment, where the press is throwing a lot of ink, where reputations stand to be made. Of course, crime is only found where it’s looked for, and right now this is a hot (and relatively easy) crime to prosecute. So it makes sense that this is where prosecutors are focusing lots of assets.

But apart from that, what does it mean about the rest of us? Almost all of these Ponzi schemes promised investors stupid-high returns. Wasn’t it obvious to the investors what was going on? Were they just blinded by the go-go stock market, while it was hot? Were they desperate for a winning number after the market soured? Lots of the alleged victims out there were sophisticated investors — one would think they at least would have known the meaning of “too good to be true.” We’d like to hear what you think is going on.

We guess people’s common sense just gets blinded by the prospect of easy gains. And it happens often enough, to enough people who ought to know better, that this crime continues to proliferate nearly a hundred years after it became part of the common lingo.

Oh well, more work for us defense attorneys.

White-collar prosecutors and defense attorneys have been keenly awaiting today’s decision in U.S. v. Ionia Management. At oral arguments last November, the court permitted amicus filer Andrew Weissmann (former head of the Enron Task Force) to make a case for limiting the criminal liability of corporations. The fact that he was given oral argument time meant that the court was at least considering the argument, hence the interest in today’s decision.

Weissman’s argument was that, although the doctrine of respondeat superior holds a corporation criminally liable for the acts of an employee, the corporation should not be liable if the employee acted contrary to the corporation’s policies.

In today’s decision, the court flatly rejected this argument. “We refuse to adopt the suggestion that the prosecution, in order to establish vicarious liability, should have to prove as a separate element in its case-in-chief that the corporation lacked effective policies and procedures to deter and detect criminal actions by its employees.”

The court went on to re-state that a corporation cannot be immunized from liability just by having a compliance program, no matter how extensive it may be. The existence of a compliance program would only be relevant to whether an employee was acting within the scope of his authority. But if employees are acting within the scope of their authority, and they break the law, then the corporation is going to be liable.

The court’s decision was a disappointment to many defense attorneys, who believe that the standard for criminal prosecution of corporations is too low. The ability to charge a corporation with a crime is a deadly weapon, as demonstrated by the downfall of Arthur Andersen in 2002. The ease of bringing such charges gives prosecutors a lot of leverage to demand full cooperation from the company when its employees are under investigation. The government can often stiff-arm corporations into making huge concessions, including stiff fines, to avoid prosecution.

But the decision was not exactly a surprise. During oral arguments, Judge Guido Calabresi questioned whether judges even could limit the existing scope of respondeat superior. It was an interesting academic issue, but Congress or perhaps the Supreme Court would have to deal with it.

It wouldn’t be very surprising to see this issue brought before the Supreme Court. Weissmann has been working on changing this bit of law since he left the government. At the heart of the problem, he says, is a misinterpretation of the Supreme Court case New York Central v. U.S., 212 U.S. 481 (1909). That case has been interpreted in such a way that criminal liability is easier to prove than civil liability under respondeat superior. That’s the opposite of how it usually works, of course.

Our prediction is that the Supreme Court won’t make the change, and it will be up to Congress to tighten up the doctrine. If at all. For the time being, nothing is changed.

District Court Judge Percy Anderson sentenced Jeanetta Standefor to more than 12 years in prison on Tuesday, for running an $18 million Ponzi scheme that preyed on middle-class black investors.

Standefor, who is also black, solicited investments from 650 people around Pasadena who thought the money would go to buying properties about to go into foreclosure. To maintain the illusion of profits, Standefor transferred $14 million of the invested money to early investors. She also spent about a million per year on herself, according to AUSA Stephanie Yonekura-McCaffery. The operation was run through her company Accelerated Funding Group — a name that is practically probable cause in itself.

At the sentencing hearing in the Central District of California, victims told Judge Anderson how they had trusted Standefor with their savings, often their life savings, after she first befriended them. Investors were told that they could make 50% profits in the first month.

Standefor’s attorney, federal defender Charles Brown, argued for leniency. “She is not a serial killer,” he said. “She is not a drug dealer. This is not a person who needs to be thrown in jail and locked up to learn her lesson.” He added that she was a foster child “who worked her entire life to prove her worth. . . [but] she took shortcuts, and started taking from Peter to pay Paul, and that’s how we got here.”

Judge Anderson disagreed with the defense attorney’s characterization, telling Standefor that even if this was just a white-collar crime, she was just as guilty “as if you’d taken a gun out and held it to the victims’ heads.”

Judge Anderson then ruled on sentence. Shortly before he imposed the sentence, however, Brown made one last attempt for leniency. Urging the judge to reconsider, Brown pointed out that the sentence was not consistent with those for similar cases around the country. Brown argued that it seemed to him that blacks get harsher sentences, even when they are convicted of white-collar crimes.

“Not with me, they don’t,” interrupted the judge, who is also black. “This isn’t about being black.”

Standefor was then sentenced to 151 months in prison and almost $9 million in restitution.

On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit ruled on Jeff Skilling’s appeal from his conviction in the Enron case, upholding the conviction, but sending the case back for re-sentencing. Skilling may be able to raise a Brady issue on remand, as well, so the case doesn’t seem to be over. The opinion is 106 pages long, so we will summarize the ruling and its meaning for you here.

Skilling challenged his conviction, on the grounds that the government’s theory of “honest services” fraud was wrong. The government’s case let the jury decide on three purposes of Skilling’s conspiracy, one of which was to deprive Enron of the honest services of its employees. Because the jury returned a general verdict, if any one of those legal theories was insufficient, then the verdict must be reversed.

Skilling focused on the honest services theory, arguing that it was insufficient because his actions were done to give Enron a higher stock price, so it was in the corporate interest. He didn’t act in secret, and wasn’t self-dealing.

In making this argument, Skilling relied on the Circuit’s previous Enron case, United States v. Brown, 459 F.3d 509. In that case, a loan secured by Nigerian barges was fraudulently booked as revenue. The defendants in that case were specifically ordered by their CFO, Andy Fastow, to carry out the deal. Not only did they believe that Enron had a corporate interest in the scheme, and was a willing beneficiary of it, but their superiors ordered and approved their actions. Furthermore, they were paid more depending on whether they successfully achieved the goal.

The Court held that Skilling’s reliance on Brown was misplaced. The Brown rule absolves low-level employees of liability for honest-services fraud when:

1) the employer creates a particular goal,
2) the employer aligns the employees’ interests with the employer’s interest in achieving that goal, and
3) higher-level management authorizes or orders improper conduct in order to reach the goal.

Here, the first two conditions were met, but the third was not. Condition 1 was met when Enron created a goal of meeting Wall Street earnings projections. Condition 2 was met as Skilling got paid more if Enron met those projections. But condition 3 was not met, as there was no evidence that anyone besides Skilling authorized his conduct. The Board tacitly approved several of the underlying transactions, but never authorized him to engage in fraudulent conduct.

Because the third condition was not met, the Brown rule does not absolve Skilling of his liability. His conviction was therefore upheld.

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With respect to sentencing, Skilling argued that the district court got the Guidelines calculation wrong, and that the sentence is unreasonable under §3553. The Court didn’t get to the §3553 issue, because it held that the Guidelines calculation was indeed incorrect, and a court has to do the Guidelines right before the §3553 factors come into play.

Skilling appealed a §3C1.1 two-level enhancement for obstruction of justice, and a §2F1.1(b)(8)(A) four-level enhancement for jeopardizing a financial institution.

The §3C1.1 enhancement was based on a determination that Skilling perjured himself as to his sale of Enron stock right after he resigned from the company. He’d tried to sell his stock while still CEO, but it would have had to be reported. So he resigned, then tried to sell his stock. But then September 11 happened, and he wasn’t able to sell until September 17. Skilling testified to the SEC that his order to sell on September 17 was due to his concerns over the market’s reaction to 9/11. The judge decided that was perjury.

On appeal, skilling didn’t argue that it wasn’t perjury. Instead, he argued that the court should have suppressed his SEC testimony in the first place, because the SEC misled him as to the fact that the investigation was criminal in nature.

The Circuit, however, pointed out that suppressible evidence can still be used at sentencing, and none of the exceptions to that rule apply here. The Court also found no justification for the original perjury. So the two-level enhancement was proper.

The §2F1.1(b)(8)(A) enhancement was based on the finding that Enron’s retirement plans were “financial institutions” for the purposes of that Guideline. Retirement plans aren’t specifically mentioned in the Guideline’s definition, which enumerates a long list of included entities. Various kinds of pension funds are included, however. And the list does include a catch-all “any similar entity.”

With respect to “pension funds,” the Guidelines don’t define the term. But a pension requires more than just employee investment for later payout — a pension has definitely determined payouts. Here, the retirement funds didn’t have specific benefits, they were just there as a pool for funding any benefits that might be given. So the Court decided they didn’t count.

With respect to the catch-all, apart from pension funds, the Guideline definition lists classic financial institutions like banks, investment houses, and the like. The Court did not want to expand the definition to declare every corporate retirement plan to be a financial institution.

Because the retirement plans weren’t financial institutions, the four-level enhancement was improper. So Skilling’s sentence was vacated, and the case was remanded for resentencing.

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In addition to these main issues, the Court also rejected Skilling’s other challenges to his trial. Giving a “deliberate ignorance” instruction was at worst harmless error. None of the other jury instructions were problematic. The venue was proper. There was no prosecutorial misconduct.

Interestingly, however, the Court specifically stated that Skilling can raise Brady issues on remand. An FBI interview note showed that Andy Fastow didn’t think he had discussed a certain list with Skilling. This was omitted from the formal “302” report provided to the defense. Skilling claims that Fastow was talking about a list of talking points that Fastow had testified at trial he actually had discussed with Skilling.

The Circuit found this troubling, but the trial court never saw the notes or ruled on this claim, so nothing could be decided on appeal. But the Court instructed that “Skilling must bring this claim to the district court before we can address it.”

Therefore, Skilling might be able to get a new trial! If Skilling can show that there was a Brady violation, this case could be far from over. The government claims that the list in question is unrelated to the case, however, so we’re just going to have to wait and see.

As we reported yesterday, the New York Attorney General and the Southern District of New York have teamed up to investigate allegations of wrongdoing with respect to credit-default swaps. The AG’s office is now reported to have subpoenaed trading data and communications from several interdealer brokers, small firms that facilitated the swaps and other trades.

A CDS is a form of insurance, though contractual in nature and not regulated. Essentially, the CDS buyer wants to protect a debt investment or asset. In return for fees from the buyer, the CDS seller agrees to make a payment if the underlying debtor defaults or goes bankrupt.

CDS contracts enabled the securitization of subprime mortgages into tranches that could be rated as investment-grade. If underlying asset values dropped, the CDS payment would still net a profit. Presuming, of course, that the CDS seller actually had the wherewithal to make the necessary payment.

Interdealer brokers earned fees from facilitating CDS deals between financial institutions. Buyers and sellers need to keep their bargaining positions secret from each other, which makes direct negotiation difficult. For a fee, an interdealer broker puts buyers and sellers together, while keeping the identities of the parties a secret from each other.

Law enforcement is now investigating whether interdealer brokers were breaking the rules, and disclosing information that they existed for the purpose of keeping secret. Also under investigation is the possibility that interdealer brokers were giving out false information, so as to manipulate CDS prices. These CDS prices in turn had a huge effect on the share values and bond prices of major financial institutions.

Three major flat-screen TV and monitor manufacturers have pled guilty to price fixing, in a case brought by the DOJ’s Antitrust Division.

Sharp, LG Display and Chunghwa will pay $585 million in fines, pursuant to their plea. The DOJ alleged that, as a result of the price-fixing conspiracies, consumers paid inflated prices for products with LCD screens. Affected products ranged from flat-screen TVs to computer monitors, laptops, iPods and cell phones.

Division chief Thomas O. Barnett stated that these were international conspiracies that “affected millions of American consumers who use computers, cell phones and numerous other household electronics every day.” Without calculating how much extra the consumers wound up paying, he predicted that this plea would now result in lower prices.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the world’s largest LCD maker, Samsung, had cooperated with the Antitrust Division and was not named in the plea announcement. AAG Barnett declined to comment on whether Samsung had received legal immunity. Federal law provides that the first company to give evidence of a criminal conspiracy can receive immunity. When the investigation first became public in 2006, Samsung stated that it had “pledged its full and continuing cooperation” with law enforcement.

“The nation’s top white-collar criminal defense practices are receiving a steady flow of inquiries from clients embroiled in the ongoing credit crisis,” reports the National Law Journal. This is consistent with reports we have heard within the white-collar defense community.

With the economy continuing to take hits from the financial sector, there seems to be a growing demand for blame. Billions of dollars in pensions and retirement funds have disappeared, the money supply is crippled by banks refusing to extend credit, and jobs and tax revenue are at stake.

As the public and its elected officials call for punishment, state and federal prosecutors are launching investigations to see whether anyone broke the law. Anyone involved with complex debt instruments, which appear to have been responsible for much of the vanished wealth, ought not to be surprised to find themselves part of a criminal or regulatory investigation.

As we previously reported, Lehman Brothers executives are already being looked at. And of course the Eastern District of New York has already indicted two managers of the Bear Stearns subprime mortgage hedge funds. But that, our sources tell us, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Credit-default swaps, which enabled much of the subprime hedge fund investments, are now the focus of a joint investigation being brought by the New York Attorney General and the Southern District of New York.

The SEC has also begun taking action in investigations that had appeared to be dormant. Of particular interest to the SEC would be whether executives made misleading statements to investors or analysts about the financial health of their funds or institutions.

“Attorneys report hearing from clients,” reports the NLJ, “who are either already in receipt of subpoenas from federal and state investigators, or who are worried about what the mail will bring. Every lawyer interviewed agreed that their clients — including those confident they kept within the law — would be wise to anticipate that the government will cast a very wide net.”

Milberg LLP partners David Bershad and Steven Schulman were sentenced in federal court yesterday afternoon, each receiving 6 months in prison. Along with two other partners, they had been convicted for offenses arising our of the payment of kickbacks to lead plaintiffs in securities and shareholder class actions, which netted the firm more than a quarter of a Billion dollars in attorney fees.

These 6-month sentences were far less than what the other two partners were given earlier this year: William Lerach got 24 months, and Melvyn Weiss got 30.

At Bershad’s sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge John Walter intitially indicated that he thought Bershad ought to get the same sentence as Lerach, as they had pled to the same conduct. Bershad’s lawyers sought probation, and the prosecution asked for 3 months in prison plus 3 months of community confinement. Apparently swayed by Bershad’s statement of remorse, letters of support, and the fact that Bershad’s plea was the first domino that led to the other pleas, the judge came down to the six-month jail term.

At Schulman’s sentencing hearing, the prosecution asked for a year in prison, as Schulman had taken longer to plea than Bershad, and so had provided less assistance. Schulman’s lawyer argued that the sentence should be no longer than Bershad’s, and that the delay in pleading guilty was due to attempts to work out a plea that would let Schulman keep his law license — notwithstanding the fact that there was no way he could conceivably keep that license given what had happened. Judge Walter wasn’t impressed with those arguments, but ultimately gave him the same 6-month sentence, taking into consideration the letters in support and the fact that Schulman had three young children who would be affected by a longer sentence.

Bershad had pled to conspiracy to obstruct justice, and to making false statements under oath. Schulman had pled to a racketeering charge. In addition to jail terms, each was sentenced to pay a $250,000 fine, on top of forfeitures of $7.75 million and $1.85 million, respectively.

Milberg LLP was formerly known as Milberg Weiss LLC, and as Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman LLP. At one time, it accounted for half of all securities class action settlements. The firm engaged in “strike suits,” wherein a corporation whose share price had fallen would be sued in a shareholder class action, with an individual shareholder identified as the class representative. The suits were brought for the purpose of settlement for nuisance value. Individual shareholders did not approach the firm, but rather the firm monitored the stock market and manufactured its own cases. To get individuals to to take the role of lead plaintiff, the firm would share its fees with them. The firm also paid kickbacks to stockbrokers who referred clients. At least one expert witness, specializing in estimating damages, was paid on a contingency-fee basis. Bershad and Schulman were indicted, along with the firm, in 2006 on various counts, including racketeering, mail fraud and bribery.