Criminal Investigations into Financial Fraud - "Window Dressing" or a Serious Trend?
The recent period of deregulation, lax enforcement and restrictions on investor and shareholder legal rights has facilitated a dramatic increase in fraudulent conduct and undermined our entire free market system.
Criminal investigations of Wall Street have soared in recent months and continue to increase, according to articles by Terry Frieden of CNNMoney.com and Brent Kendall of the Wall Street Journal. Those articles report that the FBI has 566 open corporate fraud investigations, including 43 investigations involving Wall Street and “matters directly related to the current financial crisis.” The FBI opened 36 new corporate fraud investigations in recent weeks.
The FBI’s investigations into the current financial crisis involve companies “that everybody knows about” and are focused on accounting fraud, insider trading and financial statement manipulation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The FBI described the increase in investigations as “an exponential rise” resulting in a “trend we expect to continue” that is straining the FBI’s resources, according to the articles. President Obama’s budget proposal and other bills introduced in Congress call for additional financial resources for the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate fraud cases, and both Democrats and Republicans have expressed support for increasing such resources.
The big question now is whether these “investigations” are just “window-dressing” or the authorities are serious about cleaning up our financial marketplace. In recent years, we have heard all too much about ‘investigations” only to see all too little when it came to taking actions.
Page Perry, LLC is an Atlanta-based law firm with over 125 years collective experience representing investors in securities-related litigation and arbitration. While past results are not indicative of future success, Page Perry’s attorneys have recovered over $1,000,000 for clients on more than 30 occasions. Page Perry’s attorneys are actively involved in representing institutional and corporate investors in securities cases. For further information, please contact us.
