Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. I'm June Grosso. Every
Speaker 1: day we bring you inside an analysis into the most
Speaker 1: important legal news of the day. You can find more
Speaker 1: episodes at the Bloomberg Law Podcast, on Apple podcast, SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. Billy Walters was
Speaker 1: one of the most successful sports gamblers in Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: but he just can't seem to win in court. Last week,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court turned down Walter's appeal of his seventeen
Speaker 1: conviction for masterminding a six year insider trading scheme with
Speaker 1: former Dean's Food chairman Tom Davis. Insider trading, time and
Speaker 1: time again, seems to entrap people who should know better,
Speaker 1: from a former US congressman to a former student body
Speaker 1: president at the n y U Stern School of Business.
Speaker 1: Joining me is Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State
Speaker 1: University Law School. Peter, why did Billy Walters think the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court should review his conviction? The basis for his
Speaker 1: appeal was the fact that an FBI agent had been
Speaker 1: leaking information to the Wall Street Journal in the New
Speaker 1: York Times, and Walter's claim was that that ended up
Speaker 1: tainting his conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct. Now the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court chose not to pursue the case, though I think
Speaker 1: mainly because after the Salmon decision in ten they're pretty
Speaker 1: much done with insider trading and they didn't see any
Speaker 1: real basis to overturn his conviction. So he's left serving
Speaker 1: out his approximately five years sentence. So Peter, insider trading
Speaker 1: has been in the news a lot lately. We had
Speaker 1: a former congressman pleading guilty to tipping his son, a
Speaker 1: former Parella Weinberg partners managing director convicted of tipping his father,
Speaker 1: and a former student body president at n y U
Speaker 1: Stern leading guilty to trading on inside in information himself,
Speaker 1: all trading away their careers. Is there anything common to
Speaker 1: all of them? Well, in each case you had essentially
Speaker 1: a tipper. Congressman Collins tipped off his son, and then
Speaker 1: his son in turn tipped off his fiancee's father. Both
Speaker 1: of them have entered guilty pleas along with Congressman Collins,
Speaker 1: so they were able to get information in advance. And
Speaker 1: that's also been true of the Sean Stewart case, who
Speaker 1: was at Parella Weinberg and also bilt to say, who
Speaker 1: was a junior analyst at RBC and had been student
Speaker 1: body president at the Stern School of Business. In each
Speaker 1: of those instances, it's like they stumbled across very valuable
Speaker 1: information and then either used it for themselves or, in
Speaker 1: Sean Stewart's case, told his father and his father traded
Speaker 1: on five different deal and made well over a million
Speaker 1: dollars with someone else who he provided the information to.
Speaker 1: So inside information just has this allure to people that
Speaker 1: somehow they think that they can just trade on it
Speaker 1: and no one's ever going to notice. Let's go into
Speaker 1: a little bit more depth on these, So let's start
Speaker 1: with former New York Republican Congressman Chris Collins, who tipped
Speaker 1: us on in a phone call on the White House
Speaker 1: lawn at Trump's first congressional picnic. And there's a wonderful
Speaker 1: picture where you can see Congressman Collins talking on the
Speaker 1: phone over the shoulder of Jared Kushner, and he got
Speaker 1: that information. It was an Australian pharmaceutical company and one
Speaker 1: of their drug tests was not going to work, and
Speaker 1: so he knew that as soon as it got announced
Speaker 1: that that would drive the stock price down substantially. And
Speaker 1: so you can see him, and the government got all
Speaker 1: his phone records from his cell phone. You can see
Speaker 1: him trying to call his son, and eventually they talked
Speaker 1: for about six minutes, and then almost immediately the son
Speaker 1: calls his fiance's father and essentially tips him off. So
Speaker 1: in these cases, it's really more of a matter that
Speaker 1: you get valuable information and you want to avoid losing
Speaker 1: a lot of money, and that was what happened in
Speaker 1: the Collins case, and his son and his fiance's father
Speaker 1: avoided about seven hundred thousand dollars in losses by being
Speaker 1: able to dump their shares before the information was disclosed.
Speaker 1: In your opinion, did a court ruling lead Collins to
Speaker 1: make the guilty plea. I think it was that the
Speaker 1: Judge Broderick in the Southern District of New York rejected
Speaker 1: Congressman collins claim that what he was doing was protected
Speaker 1: by the speech or debate clause of the Constitution. In fact,
Speaker 1: what Judge Broderick found was that the government didn't use
Speaker 1: any information that it obtained in violation of the speech
Speaker 1: or debate clause, and therefore that really wasn't going to
Speaker 1: be a defense for Congressman Collins. It would not have
Speaker 1: applied to his son or his fiance's father, but it
Speaker 1: was one possible lineup defense for Congressman Collins. But as
Speaker 1: soon as Judge Brodrick rejected that, and I expected, his
Speaker 1: attorneys said that we're not going to have much luck
Speaker 1: on appeal here. That's what led him to, I think,
Speaker 1: decide to plead guilty. And now prosecutors are recommending a
Speaker 1: sentence of from forty six to fifty seven months, so
Speaker 1: that will be a substantial term of imprisonment for Congressman Collins.
Speaker 1: And there are news reports that he has been begging
Speaker 1: his associates and friends to write glowing letters about him
Speaker 1: in an attempt to get leniency. Does that work It
Speaker 1: has in the past, for example, in the case of
Speaker 1: inside or trading case of Rusjah Gupta, who had been
Speaker 1: a head of Mackenzie. He ended up getting letters from,
Speaker 1: among others, Bill Gates. And that can be persuasive to
Speaker 1: a judge when people write and say that this is
Speaker 1: really a good person who went off the rails this
Speaker 1: one time. But how much it's going to persuade Judge
Speaker 1: Broderick is a different question, because one of the basis
Speaker 1: for prosecutors seeking a significant sentence is that Congressman Collins
Speaker 1: lied to the FBI, and so I suspect that the
Speaker 1: government is going to argue very strenuously that lying to
Speaker 1: the FBI and trading on inside information is not just
Speaker 1: a one off, but in fact, this was something that
Speaker 1: Congressman Collins not only engaged in but should be punished for.
Speaker 1: Let's turn now to Sean Stewart, the former Perella Weinberg
Speaker 1: Partners managing director. For the second time, he heard a
Speaker 1: jury pronounce him guilty for insider training and it took
Speaker 1: them just sixty five minutes. That's right, and that is
Speaker 1: a very quick decision by the jury, which leads me
Speaker 1: to think that Stewart's claimed that he really just kind
Speaker 1: of accidentally told his father that they were drinking beers
Speaker 1: and he was telling his father about his work. That
Speaker 1: the jury did not buy that story and therefore convicted him,
Speaker 1: and he was convicted on nine counts, and nine counts
Speaker 1: in sixty five minutes is very quick, and so will
Speaker 1: he be facing additional prison time He's already served over
Speaker 1: a year in federal prison from his la your conviction.
Speaker 1: It will be an interesting question whether Judge Rakoff will
Speaker 1: impose additional time on him. Now, Judge Rakoff has been
Speaker 1: fairly tough on insider traders. For example, he gave Rajac
Speaker 1: gupt to two years in prison for tipping off Raj
Speaker 1: Raj Rottenham. So there is at least a chance that
Speaker 1: Sean Stewart will be sent back to a federal prison.
Speaker 1: Will find out at the end of January when his
Speaker 1: sentencing is scheduled. What I've found fascinating about the trial
Speaker 1: and the retrial of Sean Stewart was that we've discussed before,
Speaker 1: the most important decision for a defendant is whether to
Speaker 1: take the stand or not. Stewart didn't take the stand
Speaker 1: in his second trial, but he did in his first,
Speaker 1: so it seems like nothing work for him. No, it didn't.
Speaker 1: And by taking the stand in the first trial, that
Speaker 1: was really because his father couldn't testify, and his father
Speaker 1: didn't testify in the second trial either to say that
Speaker 1: he just got the information from Sean more or less
Speaker 1: by accident, and so really by not testifying, I think
Speaker 1: that let the jury see that there really wasn't that
Speaker 1: much to the defense, that it was really just an
Speaker 1: accident that his father took this information and went out
Speaker 1: and tipped someone else and traded on it. I think
Speaker 1: the power of the insider trading narrative is very, very strong,
Speaker 1: and when jurors see confidential information being doled out, the
Speaker 1: immediate reaction is you've done something wrong and therefore you're
Speaker 1: guilty of a crime. And finally we have the former
Speaker 1: student body president at the n y U Stern School
Speaker 1: of Business who earned his graduate degree and is now
Speaker 1: pleading guilty to insider trading. And the amount involved was
Speaker 1: just a little bit under a hundred thousand dollars, which
Speaker 1: always leads me to the question would you sell your
Speaker 1: career on Wall Street for a hundred thousand dollars? And
Speaker 1: the answer to that question ought to be no. But
Speaker 1: in fact, in this situation built to siy is the
Speaker 1: former student body president at the Stern School of Business,
Speaker 1: And you just wonder what was the temptation there? What
Speaker 1: was it that he saw and said to himself, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go ahead and make a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars because now he is likely to be sentenced to
Speaker 1: a term in a federal prison, and any hopes that
Speaker 1: he had of a Wall Street career are basically done.
Speaker 1: No firm is ever going to touch someone who has
Speaker 1: been convicted of insider trading. We've seen that repeatedly, and
Speaker 1: so he has very little hope of a financial career
Speaker 1: in the future. And you wonder, why what is it
Speaker 1: that drew him to buy the options and then make
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollars and get caught. You mentioned the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court has sort of done with insider trading. Do
Speaker 1: you think we've seen the last of all the high profile,
Speaker 1: you know, appellate court rulings on insider trading. Is it
Speaker 1: a settled area now? I think it is a fairly
Speaker 1: settled area. And after the Salmon case in the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court made it very clear that if you are providing
Speaker 1: information to a family member or a close friend, that
Speaker 1: that's really the end of the analysis, that that is
Speaker 1: enough to establish what the Supreme Court is called the
Speaker 1: quid pro quo for giving information and then getting something
Speaker 1: in return. And it's that warm, fuzzy feeling that you
Speaker 1: get when you give a gift. So in the Salmon case,
Speaker 1: one brother was giving a gift to another brother to
Speaker 1: be able to make some money. And the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: I think has largely resolved the tipping issue, so whether
Speaker 1: they'll really returned insider trading, it would have to be
Speaker 1: a case that really brings up some new issues. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, insider trading law is fairly well settled.
Speaker 1: I would say the cases are easy to determine. There's
Speaker 1: always a little bit at the edges, but for the
Speaker 1: most part it is a fairly well settled area of law. Now,
Speaker 1: thanks Peter. That's Peter Handing, professor at Wayne State University
Speaker 1: Law School. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast.
Speaker 1: You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. I'm June Brosso.
Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg. Yeah,