Insights

With the U.S. Senate confirming Gary Gensler as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Kobre & Kim’s Bill McGovern, a former SEC branch chief, sat down with Compliance Week to explore how Gensler will lead the agency.

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In a Q&A for Financier Worldwide, Kobre & Kim’s Scott Hulsey and William McGovern examined the latest trends in U.S. corporate fraud and corruption enforcement.

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Financial services institutions often focus on the actions of enforcers like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in assessing their exposure.  And rightly so.  What they may fail to consider, however, are the antitrust risks of their business dealings, particularly as government enforcement agencies and private parties increasingly employ antitrust perspectives. 

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Last week, a federal jury in Texas returned US $2.18 billion verdict against semiconductor giant Intel for infringement of two semiconductor patents. In an interview with Chinese magazine 21st Century Business Review (21CBR), Kobre & Kim intellectual property litigator Michael Ng shared his thoughts on the case.

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In a groundbreaking judgment obtained by Kobre & Kim, the BVI Commercial Court for the first time made a committal order against a personal defendant residing outside of the British Virgin Islands for failing to appear at a hearing. With their colleague John Han, Kobre & Kim’s Merrick Watson and Timothy de Swardt, who obtained the ruling, explained the significance of the judgment in an article for Global Restructuring Review.

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Bitcoin’s rise in price has coincided with its rise in attractiveness for a growing number of investors, including ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs). However, UHNWIs and their advisers should be wary of potential legal exposure as legal regimes are evolving around the world, including in Asia-Pacific, Kobre & Kim’s Calvin Koo writes in Wealth Briefing Asia.

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Days before New York reached a settlement with digital currency trading platform Bitfinex after a long investigation, Ripple Labs registered as a business in Wyoming, underscoring the Swiss-cheese state of U.S. digital currency regulation and Wyoming’s effort to become the country’s digital currency center. Kobre & Kim’s Benjamin Sauter analyzed the current regulatory framework when he sat down with Cointelegraph.

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Ghislaine Maxwell became the latest in a string of defendants held in pretrial detention in part because of her significant financial resources. With home confinement being more comfortable and allowing easier coordination with counsel, what can wealthy defendants do to make pretrial release more likely? Kobre & Kim’s Sean Buckley and Amanda Tuminelli explain in an article for Law360.

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The rise and fall of GameStop, Dogecoin and other meme stocks have left day traders and institutional investors angrily accusing each other of market manipulation. However, as Kobre & Kim’s Benjamin Sauter, Steven Perlstein, William McGovern and David McGill explained in an op-ed for CoinDesk, both sides may come to regret this shortsighted argument.

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Around the world, government-led antitrust actions and associated private litigation—such as the ongoing “techlash” phenomenon in the United States—are on the rise.   Many companies naturally view this trend as creating risk and possible exposure.  But companies are also advised to consider how to deploy antitrust tools offensively.

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As a result of recent developments, U.S. regulators and prosecutors are “armed with a new tactic” to use criminal wire fraud charges to target securities and digital currency traders, Kobre & Kim’s David McGill, Jonathan Cogan, Sean Buckley and Benjamin Sauter wrote in an article for Bloomberg Law.

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A precedent-setting case has shown how recovering stolen digital assets may now be even easier than traditional asset recovery. Kobre & Kim’s Benjamin Sauter, who took part in that case, spoke with Forkast News about the case’s impact on the wider industry.

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As U.S. financial regulators meet to discuss the wild market swings in GameStop and other stocks, Kobre & Kim’s David McGill told Compliance Week that what happened may just be “the tip of the iceberg.”

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As part of the recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 substantially expands the United States’ anti-money laundering (AML) regime, which may pose far-reaching implications to high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and politically exposed persons. Kobre & Kim’s Evelyn Sheehan and Jason Short spell out the consequences in an article for Law360.

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Reddit users’ efforts to squeeze short sellers by driving up the stock price of Gamestop has drawn the attention of regulators. Kobre & Kim’s Andrew Lourie, a former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer focused on market manipulation, analyzed what legal action may follow when he sat down with Yahoo Finance.

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