Jonathan Feld Offers Perspective on SAC Indictment for Insider Trading

Jonathan S. Feld, member of Dykema’s Litigation Department whose practice focuses on Business Litigation, White-Collar Criminal Defense, Internal Investigations and Corporate Compliance matters, was quoted in an article that appeared in Operational Risk & Regulation and in the July 26, 2013 edition of Risk.net, an online information resource covering the international financial risk management sector.

In the article, “Hedge fund compliance to 'ratchet up' after SAC indictment for insider trading,” Feld observes that this week’s indictment of SAC—one of the world’s largest hedge funds—for repeated compliance failures that enabled insider trading to flourish at the company, will have lasting consequences for others in the alternative investment space.

“This is going to ratchet up everyone’s compliance even more,” says Feld. “Everyone’s going to need to review all their compliance.”

Feld suggests that the effect of this just-announced indictment will extend beyond SAC to other hedge fund companies. “You can never really extrapolate too much from one indictment to the other but a lot of the very aggressive firms are going to have to revise their policies or at least review their policies.” With this decision, Feld notes, both the U.S. Attorney’s office and the SEC are stating “there’s no company that’s too big or no person that’s too important that we can’t pursue these leads.”