The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s case against Citigroup’s Brian Stoker, a director in the bank’s Global Markets group, seemed clear-cut. Stoker structured and marketed an investment portfolio consisting of credit default swaps. The agency accused him of misrepresenting deal terms and defrauding investors for not disclosing the bank’s bet against the portfolio while pitching the investment vehicle to customers. But when it came to trial earlier this summer, the government could not prove that Stoker knew or should have known that the pitches were misleading, and the jury didn’t convict.
It’s hardly surprising. The SEC’s failure to secure a guilty verdict is one more sign that the commission still has not climbed out of the morass in which it was mired for most of the Bush years. The agency tasked with overseeing some 5,000 broker-dealers, 10,000 investor-advisers, 10,000 hedge funds, and 12,000 public companies, as well as mutual funds, the exchanges and even the rating agencies, is ailing because of outdated rules, systems and structures.
What exactly ails the SEC? For starters, the legal framework in place to prosecute securities fraud is flawed. The commission was established to create rules that prohibit “any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance.” But intent or recklessness is required to prove fraud or misrepresentation, and that can be difficult because the agency doesn’t have enough staff to comb through reams of documents for rare evidence that someone intended to cheat. In the Citigroup case, the agency instead relied on a rule that simply required a showing of negligence, but the prosecution could not prove even that.
Now suppose a corporation engages in illegal activity while operating a coal mine. And that illegal activity leads to the death of 29 of its workers.
