Worst Insider Traders? Lawyers, CPAs or Pols?

Letter to Philippians: There’s an insider-trading scandal rocking the biggest M&A law firms, but if it’s possible for individual(s) in any one of these legal giants to go rogue, what about the Big 4 accounting firms or SEC regulators let alone pols employing them?

For over two decades I was a potential insider, either working for or covering as a legal journalist, several of the biggest international law firms with some of the biggest M&A shops … and never once did I so much as get an inkling that the firms’ would tolerate insider trading for a second by one of its own. Of course, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Yet, the WSJ report cites a DOJ complaint detailing how “A job-hopping lawyer accessed files & recruited lawyers at elite firms to tip traders about pending deals.” Those details are shocking to many in the profession, but not just because it names Boston-based Goodwin Procter as the one-time home of a one Nicolo Nourafchan who allegedly pursued “a lucrative side hustle providing traders around the world with illicit tips about coming buyouts for over a decade.” The prosecutors go on to name other prominent law firms from which they say M&A lawyers were recruited to “dish on their deals,” including Weil Gotshal and Wachtell Lipton. Every firm mentioned unequivocally denied pre-knowledge of the inside job & assured they cooperated fully with the FBI & SEC investigators.

It all rings true. But the gap in the targeted coverage that remains, is that, if a single insider like Nourafchan can wreak this much damage in these stickler, obsessive, compulsive, even paranoid law firms in the Am Law 100, isn’t it equally likely in the business universe for a kindred spirit in one of the Big 4 accounting firms? Or, within one of the government regulatory agencies like the SEC? I vote “yes!” And what about those oversight pols in Congress who amazingly amass huge stock portfolios & net miraculous gains, even though they are too dim-witted to vote in favor of the SAVE Act (HR 22/ S 1383?

Davd Soul