My good friends and colleagues Jim Sallah and Jeff Cox from Sallah & Cox, LLC have just proved that SEC complaints contain allegations, not facts. Jim and Jeff just finished a two week trial in Miami, and after an hour of deliberations, the jury cleared their client of any wrongdoing.
According to their press release, the jury found that Dr. Sebastian De La Maza, age 73, did not engage in insider trading by purchasing stock issued by Miami-based Neff Corp. only weeks before the company was acquired by Odyssey Investment Partners in 2005. Dr. De La Maza, according to the SEC’s complaint, allegedly learned about the acquisition from his daughter, who is married to Neff’s former CEO.
The trial was one of the first insider trading cases to be heard by a jury sitting in the Southern District of Florida in nearly a decade. Dr. De La Maza adamantly denied the allegations and presented evidence at trial that he had a seven-year history of closely following and trading Neff, and that his purchases prior to Neff’s acquisition were consistent with his trading history.
Despite the SEC’s arguments, it took the jury a little more than one hour to determine that Dr. De La Maza was not liable for insider trading. The defense verdict is the culmination of a federal investigation and litigation spanning nearly half of a decade.
Earlier this year, Sallah & Cox also successfully defended Dr. De La Maza in a private, shareholder suit in federal court in Miami based on the same allegations, which was dismissed by the Court on different grounds. (Kamin et al. v. Acord, et al., Case No. 09-22829-Civ-Jordan).
Jim and Jeff are partners in Sallah & Cox, LLC. Mark Astarita, the author of this blog, has a working relationship with the firm, whose web site is at www.sallahcox.com
Knocking down barriers to knowledge
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As much as technology has advanced, there are still many barriers between you and the answers you’re looking for—whether you’re juggling a clunky mobile keyboard or waiting for a website to load. Today we held a media event in San Francisco where we talked about some of the latest things we’re doing to tackle these barriers on mobile, announced that we’re bringing our speech recognition and computer vision technology to the desktop, and took the next step for Google Instant—Instant Pages.
The thirst for knowledge doesn’t stop when you step away from your computer, it continues on your mobile device. In the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years.
One of the technologies driving this growth is speech recognition. With Voice Search, you don’t have to type on a tiny touchscreen. You can just speak your query and the answer is on the way. We’ve invested tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology—for example, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say. As the quality has increased, so has usage: in the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years worth of voice to our system.
We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, “Can I speak for this?”—it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we've added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box. Simply click the microphone, and you can speak your search. This can be particularly useful for hard-to-spell searches like [bolognese sauce] or complex searches like [translate to spanish where can I buy a hamburger]. Voice Search on desktop is rolling out now on google.com in English, but in the meantime you can check it out in our video:
Searching with speech recognition started first on mobile, and so did searching with computer vision. Google Goggles has enabled you to search by snapping a photo on your mobile phone since 2009, and today we’re introducing Search by Image on desktop. Next to the microphone on images.google.com, you’ll also see a little camera for the new Search by Image feature. If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks—the search [mountain path] probably isn’t going to tell you where you were, but computer vision may just do the trick. Search by Image is rolling out now globally in 40 languages. We’re also releasing Chrome and Firefox extensions that enable you to search any image on the web by right-clicking.
Whether you type, speak or upload a photo, once you’ve indicated what you’re looking for the next step in your search is to sift through the results and pick one. To make this faster, last year we introduced Google Instant, which gives you search results while you type. We estimated Google Instant saves you between two and five seconds on typical searches. But once you’ve picked a result, you click, and then wait again for the page to load—for an average of about five seconds.
We want to help you save some of that time as well, so today we took the next step for Google Instant: Instant Pages. Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches. Let’s say you’re searching for information about the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, so you search for [dc folklife festival]. As you scan the results deciding which one to choose, Google is already prerendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly.
Instant Pages will prerender results when we’re confident you’re going to click them. The good news is that we’ve been working for years to develop our relevance technology, and we can fairly accurately predict when to prerender. To use Instant Pages, you’ll want to get our next beta release of Chrome, which includes prerendering (for the adventurous, you can try Instant Pages today with the developer version). It’s one more step towards an even faster web.
To learn more about today’s news, visit our new Inside Search website at www.google.com/insidesearch. There you’ll find a recording of the event (when it’s ready), answers to common questions and links to other blog posts about today’s news on the Mobile blog and Inside Search blog. The Inside Search website is our new one-stop shop for Google search tips, games, features and an under-the-hood look at our technology, so there’s plenty for you to explore.
We’re far from the dream of truly instantaneous access to knowledge, but we’re on our way to help you realize that dream.
Update 4:38p.m.: Watch the video and see a slideshow of today's event below.
Here you can see that mobile search traffic growth over the past three years (the red line) is comparable to overall Google search traffic growth over the same duration (the blue line) but earlier in our history.
One of the technologies driving this growth is speech recognition. With Voice Search, you don’t have to type on a tiny touchscreen. You can just speak your query and the answer is on the way. We’ve invested tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology—for example, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say. As the quality has increased, so has usage: in the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years worth of voice to our system.
We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, “Can I speak for this?”—it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we've added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box. Simply click the microphone, and you can speak your search. This can be particularly useful for hard-to-spell searches like [bolognese sauce] or complex searches like [translate to spanish where can I buy a hamburger]. Voice Search on desktop is rolling out now on google.com in English, but in the meantime you can check it out in our video:
Searching with speech recognition started first on mobile, and so did searching with computer vision. Google Goggles has enabled you to search by snapping a photo on your mobile phone since 2009, and today we’re introducing Search by Image on desktop. Next to the microphone on images.google.com, you’ll also see a little camera for the new Search by Image feature. If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks—the search [mountain path] probably isn’t going to tell you where you were, but computer vision may just do the trick. Search by Image is rolling out now globally in 40 languages. We’re also releasing Chrome and Firefox extensions that enable you to search any image on the web by right-clicking.
Whether you type, speak or upload a photo, once you’ve indicated what you’re looking for the next step in your search is to sift through the results and pick one. To make this faster, last year we introduced Google Instant, which gives you search results while you type. We estimated Google Instant saves you between two and five seconds on typical searches. But once you’ve picked a result, you click, and then wait again for the page to load—for an average of about five seconds.
We want to help you save some of that time as well, so today we took the next step for Google Instant: Instant Pages. Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches. Let’s say you’re searching for information about the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, so you search for [dc folklife festival]. As you scan the results deciding which one to choose, Google is already prerendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly.
Instant Pages will prerender results when we’re confident you’re going to click them. The good news is that we’ve been working for years to develop our relevance technology, and we can fairly accurately predict when to prerender. To use Instant Pages, you’ll want to get our next beta release of Chrome, which includes prerendering (for the adventurous, you can try Instant Pages today with the developer version). It’s one more step towards an even faster web.
To learn more about today’s news, visit our new Inside Search website at www.google.com/insidesearch. There you’ll find a recording of the event (when it’s ready), answers to common questions and links to other blog posts about today’s news on the Mobile blog and Inside Search blog. The Inside Search website is our new one-stop shop for Google search tips, games, features and an under-the-hood look at our technology, so there’s plenty for you to explore.
We’re far from the dream of truly instantaneous access to knowledge, but we’re on our way to help you realize that dream.
Update 4:38p.m.: Watch the video and see a slideshow of today's event below.
SEC Suspends Trading in 17 Penny Stocks
Rabu, 08 Juni 2011 0 komentar
Yesterday the SEC suspended trading in 17 microcap stocks because of questions about the adequacy and accuracy of publicly available information about the companies, which trade in the over-the-counter (OTC) market.
The trading suspensions spring from a joint effort by SEC regional offices in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Philadelphia; its Office of Market Intelligence; and its new Microcap Fraud Working Group, which uses a coordinated, proactive approach to detecting and deterring fraud involving microcap securities. The trading suspensions follow a similar suspension last week against Uniontown Energy Inc. (UTOG), based in Henderson, Nev., and Vancouver, Canada.
The 17 companies and their ticker symbols are:
- American Pacific Rim Commerce Group (APRM), based in Citra, Fla.
- Anywhere MD, Inc. (ANWM), based in Altascadero, Calif.
- Calypso Wireless Inc. (CLYW), based in Houston.
- Cascadia Investments, Inc. (CDIV), based in Tacoma, Wash.
- CytoGenix Inc. (CYGX), based in Houston.
- Emerging Healthcare Solutions Inc. (EHSI), based in Houston.
- Evolution Solar Corp. (EVSO), based in The Woodlands, Texas.
- Global Resource Corp. (GBRC), based in Morrisville, N.C.
- Go Solar USA Inc. (GSLO), based in New Orleans.
- Kore Nutrition Inc. (KORE), based in Henderson, Nev.
- Laidlaw Energy Group Inc. (LLEG), based in New York City.
- Mind Technologies Inc. (METK), based in Cardiff, Calif.
- Montvale Technologies Inc. (IVVI), based in Montvale, N.J.
- MSGI Security Solutions Inc. (MSGI), based in New York City.
- Prime Star Group Inc. (PSGI), based in Las Vegas, Nev.
- Solar Park Initiatives Inc. (SOPV), based in Ponte Verde Beach, Fla.
- United States Oil & Gas Corp. (USOG), based in Austin, Texas.
SEC Suspends Trading in 17 Companies in Proactive Effort to Combat Microcap Stock Fraud
SCOTUS Makes Securities Fraud Suits Easier
0 komentarHalliburton Loses As Supreme Court Backs Securities Suits
The U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for investors to press securities fraud suits, ruling for shareholders who accuse Halliburton Co. of misrepresenting its financial condition while under Dick Cheney’s leadership.
The justices today unanimously said the shareholders can sue as a group without first establishing that they lost money as a result of the alleged fraud.
2nd Circuit Affirms $400 Million FINRA Arbitration Award
Selasa, 07 Juni 2011 0 komentar
Professor Jill Gross at the ADR Prof Blog provides the details - the Second Circuit affirmed a denial of a vacatur motion in the context of a $400 million FINRA arbitration award. In STMicroelectronics, N.V. v. Credit Suisse Securities (USA), LLC, Docket No. 10-3847-cv (2d Cir. June 2, 2011), Credit Suisse moved to vacate an award against it arising out of its sale of auction-rate securities (“ARS”) to STMicroelectronics (“ST”), a semiconductor manufacturer. Credit Suisse sold ARS to ST, and, when the ARS market froze in August 2007, more than $400 million of ARS owned by ST failed at auction, rendering them illiquid and significantly lower in value.
Second Circuit Affirms $400 Million FINRA Arbitration Award
Second Circuit Affirms $400 Million FINRA Arbitration Award
But He Said He Did It Alone - SEC Charges Longtime Madoff Employee With Fraud
0 komentarNo one believed Madoff when he claimed that he conducted his massive fraud by himself without any help. now the SEC has charged Eric Lipkin, with helping Bernard L. Madoff and his firm deceive and defraud investors and regulators about the massive Ponzi scheme.
“Eric Lipkin helped create the detailed and entirely phony trading and business records that contributed to the success of Madoff’s fraud,” said George S. Canellos, Director of the SEC's New York Regional Office. “The SEC is committed to holding accountable those who helped to perpetrate and conceal Madoff’s scheme.”
The SEC’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that for more than a decade, Lipkin helped Madoff defraud investors and mislead auditors and regulators about Madoff’s fraudulent, multi-billion dollar advisory operations. According to the complaint, Lipkin processed payroll records for “no-show” employees, falsified records of investors’ account holdings, and played a role in executing the entirely fictitious investment strategy that Madoff and BMIS claimed to be pursuing on behalf of its clients. In fact, Madoff used investors’ funds to enrich himself, his family, and his associates, and to pay off other investors. Lipkin also helped Madoff deceive regulators by preparing fake Depository Trust Clearing Corporation (DTCC) reports showing the sham investments for clients. Lipkin received annual bonuses from the firm, including for his work to mislead auditors and examiners, and he received $720,000 from Madoff to purchase a house, an amount he never paid back.
Without admitting or denying the allegations of the SEC’s complaint, Lipkin has consented to a proposed partial judgment, which, if entered by the court, will impose a permanent injunction against Lipkin and require him to disgorge ill-gotten gains and pay a fine in an amount to be determined by the court at a later time.
The SEC’s complaint against Lipkin alleges that he violated Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933; violated and aided and abetted violations of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder; aided and abetted violations of Sections 204, 206(1) and 206(2) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and Rule 204-2 thereunder, and Sections 15(c) and 17(a) of the Exchange Act and Rules 10b-3 and 17a-3 thereunder.
The SEC Press Release and Related Documents
Principal Protection Notes: Timely Warning from the SEC?
Jumat, 03 Juni 2011 0 komentarFor the past two years we have been investigating investor claims regarding principal protection notes and the litigation and arbitrations that have followed. Millions of dollars have been lost in these notes.
Today the SEC demonstrated one of the more significant issues with its regulatory program - closing the barn door after the horses are gone. Today, years after these sales of principal protection notes to thousands of investors, the SEC's Office of Investor Education and Advocacy and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has issued an investor alert regarding the product. Years after the fact.
The alert, called Structured Notes with Principal Protection: Note the Terms of Your Investment is intended to educate investors about the risks of structured notes with principal protection, and to help them understand how these complex financial products work. While the SEC correctly notes that the retail market for these notes has grown in recent years, it completely overlooks the fact that thousands of investors have already lost hundreds of millions of dollars in these notes.
Structured notes with principal protection typically combine a zero-coupon bond – which pays no interest until the bond matures — with an option or other derivative product whose payoff is linked to an underlying asset, index or benchmark. The underlying asset, index or benchmark can vary widely, from commonly cited market benchmarks to currencies, commodities and spreads between interest rates. The investor is entitled to participate in a return that is linked to a specified change in the value of the underlying asset. However, investors should know that these notes might be structured in a way such that their upside exposure to the underlying asset, index or benchmark is limited or capped.
Investors who hold these notes until maturity will typically get back at least some of their investment, even if the underlying asset, index or benchmark declines. But protection levels vary, with some of these products guaranteeing as little as 10 percent — and any guarantee is only as good as the financial strength of the company that makes that promise.
“Structured notes with principal protection contain risks that may surprise many investors and can have payout structures that are difficult to understand,” said Lori J. Schock, Director of the SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy. “This alert is a ‘must read’ for investors considering these products, especially those with the mistaken belief that these investments offer complete downside protection.”
“The current low interest rate environment might make the potentially higher yields offered by structured notes with principal protection enticing to investors,” said FINRA Senior Vice President for Investor Education John Gannon. “But retail investors should realize that chasing a higher yield by investing in these products could mean winding up with an expensive, risky, complex and illiquid investment.”
Our firm has been advising investors and financial advisors who were mislead by the wirehouses regarding the safety of principal protection notes since 2008, and continues to do so. If you have any questions about such cases, feel free to contact us at ppn@beamlaw.com
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