Monday, July 4, 2011
Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose,Andrews Kurth, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale, Harold Degenhardt, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher,
"Proskauer Rose and Partner Thomas Sjoblom Further Implicated in the Allen Stanford Ponzi Scheme, Failures of SEC in Stanford Cited Further Supporting Iviewit & Eliot Bernstein’s Federal Trillion Dollar
Source of Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose,Andrews Kurth, SEC Corruption, SEC Whistleblower, Harold Degenhardt, Gibson, Dunn and Crutche, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale Post
http://iviewit.tv/wordpress/?p=307
Lawsuit Claims
April 19, 2010 4:14 PM
Report Rips SEC, Andrews Kurth Partner
Posted by Zach Lowe
It has been a very bad year for the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it got even worse Friday with the release of a report from the agency’s inspector general’s office which concludes the SEC bungled its investigation into Allen Stanford’s alleged $8 billion Ponzi scheme.
The 159-page report, available here, says that on four occasions starting in 1997, examiners in the SEC’s Fort Worth, Texas, offices recommended the agency investigate Stanford for what some examiners characterized as an obvious fraud, according to Reuters.
More interesting from our perspective is the report’s recommendation that an Andrews Kurth partner face possible sanctions for doing legal work on Stanford’s behalf just months after leaving the same SEC office that was investigating Stanford for possible fraud.
The 159-page report, available here, says that on four occasions starting in 1997, examiners in the SEC’s Fort Worth, Texas, offices recommended the agency investigate Stanford for what some examiners characterized as an obvious fraud, according to Reuters.
More interesting from our perspective is the report’s recommendation that an Andrews Kurth partner face possible sanctions for doing legal work on Stanford’s behalf just months after leaving the same SEC office that was investigating Stanford for possible fraud.
The report lays much of the blame on Spencer Barasch, a former Assistant Director of the SEC’s Forth Worth enforcement office and now a partner at Andrews Kurth. (Barasch did not respond to a message seeking comment.)
Other SEC employees who wanted to pursue Stanford told the inspector general that Barasch and Harold Degenhardt, another top SEC official in Fort Worth who left in 2005 for a job at Fulbright & Jaworski, preferred smaller cases that were easier to prove and resolve quickly.
The Stanford case would take a lot of time, and the two men made their lack of interest in it clear, the report states. “[Degenhardt] came from a big law firm, and he quickly decided the way to impress people was to come up with lots of numbers,” one SEC staffer told the inspector general’s office. “And [Barasch], of course, was part of that.”
Degenhardt was at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher before joining the SEC, according to his current firm bio, which remains on Fulbright’s Web page even though the firm claims Degenhardt retired in 2007. The firm’s Web site lists him as a special consultant.
Other SEC employees who wanted to pursue Stanford told the inspector general that Barasch and Harold Degenhardt, another top SEC official in Fort Worth who left in 2005 for a job at Fulbright & Jaworski, preferred smaller cases that were easier to prove and resolve quickly.
The Stanford case would take a lot of time, and the two men made their lack of interest in it clear, the report states. “[Degenhardt] came from a big law firm, and he quickly decided the way to impress people was to come up with lots of numbers,” one SEC staffer told the inspector general’s office. “And [Barasch], of course, was part of that.”
Degenhardt was at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher before joining the SEC, according to his current firm bio, which remains on Fulbright’s Web page even though the firm claims Degenhardt retired in 2007. The firm’s Web site lists him as a special consultant.
Still, the central figure who takes the bulk of the blame in the report is undoubtedly Barasch. He left the SEC in the middle of 2005, and within weeks of leaving, he had already asked the agency for permission to represent Stanford in matters before it, the report says.
Agency officials denied the request, saying Barasch would be violating federal rules that ban top federal employees from doing work on a matters they previously investigated at a federal agency, the report states.
Barasch responded in 2006 by saying he could not remember investigating Stanford even though records show he attended meetings about the possible Ponzi scheme throughout his tenure at the SEC.
Agency officials denied the request, saying Barasch would be violating federal rules that ban top federal employees from doing work on a matters they previously investigated at a federal agency, the report states.
Barasch responded in 2006 by saying he could not remember investigating Stanford even though records show he attended meetings about the possible Ponzi scheme throughout his tenure at the SEC.
When the SEC finally charged Stanford in 2009, Barasch once again asked if he could get involved with the case. “Every lawyer in Texas and beyond is going to get rich over this case,” Barasch reportedly told the inspector general in explaining his continued requests to work on the Stanford case, according to the inspector general’sreport. “Okay? And I hated being on the sidelines.”
The report includes testimony and e-mail records indicating Barasch had performed at least 12 hours of billable work for Stanford even though the SEC denied him permission to do so.
Barasch claimed he had merely reviewed a draft of one letter, but e-mails and other records show he was in close contact with Thomas Sjoblom, the former Proskauer Rose partner who was once Stanford’s go-to lawyer. (You may recall that Sjoblom himself isthe target of legal action for his alleged conduct in representing Stanford, as we have previously reported.) The inspector general has referred Barasch to ethics committees in Washington, D.C. and Texas for possible action, the report states.
Barasch claimed he had merely reviewed a draft of one letter, but e-mails and other records show he was in close contact with Thomas Sjoblom, the former Proskauer Rose partner who was once Stanford’s go-to lawyer. (You may recall that Sjoblom himself isthe target of legal action for his alleged conduct in representing Stanford, as we have previously reported.) The inspector general has referred Barasch to ethics committees in Washington, D.C. and Texas for possible action, the report states.
The report also shows that internal SEC employees complained that Barasch showed little interest in pursuing Stanford while at the SEC. The agency dropped one early investigation when Stanford did not comply with a voluntary request for documents.
They dropped another in 1998 when Wayne Secore, one of Stanford’s early lawyers, assured Barasch that Stanford was legit, the report says. The decisions surprised other SEC employees, and one of those employees recalled that the 1998 decision came up again when she, Barasch, and others dined out in New Orleans last year.
Barasch again mentioned at dinner that the assurances of Stanford’s lawyer were good enough for him, the employee told the inspector general. Barasch has denied ever saying that, calling the employee’s account “absurd,” the report says. “I would never accept an attorney’s representation about anything,” he told the inspector general.
They dropped another in 1998 when Wayne Secore, one of Stanford’s early lawyers, assured Barasch that Stanford was legit, the report says. The decisions surprised other SEC employees, and one of those employees recalled that the 1998 decision came up again when she, Barasch, and others dined out in New Orleans last year.
Barasch again mentioned at dinner that the assurances of Stanford’s lawyer were good enough for him, the employee told the inspector general. Barasch has denied ever saying that, calling the employee’s account “absurd,” the report says. “I would never accept an attorney’s representation about anything,” he told the inspector general.
According to the report, things improved at the SEC when Katherine Addleman took over Barasch’s position in the Fort Worth enforcement office at the SEC. Addleman, now a partner at Haynes and Boone, was less obsessed with what critics called “slam dunk” cases and more willing to take on bigger projects such as the Stanford investigation, the report says. Addleman did not return a call seeking comment.
One other note: The report gives further ammunition to critics who suggest the SEC is more likely to go easy on entities who hire ex-SEC lawyers to represent them during the early phases of an investigation. Remarks from an anonymous SEC enforcement attorney included in the inspector general’s report indicate Stanford’s hiring of Sjoblom, a former higher-up at the SEC, helped stave off an aggressive investigation of Stanford in 2005.
“Here we had this kind of legitimate looking operation with a lawyer [Thomas Sjoblom] that used to be with the SEC, and he’s making these representations to us, and there was just so much that we didn’t have,” the lawyer told the inspector general. “So what kind of case could we bring?”
“Here we had this kind of legitimate looking operation with a lawyer [Thomas Sjoblom] that used to be with the SEC, and he’s making these representations to us, and there was just so much that we didn’t have,” the lawyer told the inspector general. “So what kind of case could we bring?”
Critics have recently raised questions about the SEC’s revolving door in the context of the agency’s prolonged failure to sniff out alleged fraud at the fund Allied Capital. In the early stages of the investigation in 2004, Allied retained a former SEC lawyer who joined Venable and registered as a lobbyist for Allied within weeks of leaving the SEC, according to our prior reporting. Later, Allied retained Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr’s William McLucas, former director of enforcement at the SEC, who appeared to intimidate SEC staffers, according to a separate inspector general’s report released last month.
That’s right—two really bad inspector general’s reports in the last few weeks alone. Like we said: It has been a very bad few months for the SEC."
Source of Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose,Andrews Kurth, SEC Corruption, SEC Whistleblower, Harold Degenhardt, Gibson, Dunn and Crutche, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale Post
http://iviewit.tv/wordpress/?p=307
Laura Pendergest-Holt, Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose, Kevin Edmundson -
"Miami Meetings at Center of Stanford Woes
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By Andy Meek
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Thomas Sjoblom, an attorney at the international law firm Proskauer Rose LLP, walked into the office of a female Stanford Financial Group executive in Miami after a tense series of private meetings earlier on a February day with Stanford’s top brass.
Sjoblom, an attorney representing Stanford, was part of a small group of executives who over the course of several days in early February were meeting in Miami to discuss the financial health and performance of the Stanford family of companies.
The meetings also were prep sessions for Laura Pendergest-Holt, Stanford’s chief investment officer who was scheduled to give testimony one week later to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which had for months been probing Stanford.
Those private meetings came amid the final, frantic days of the Stanford business empire. Fewer than two weeks later, the SEC in mid-February filed civil charges against Stanford chairman R. Allen Stanford, Stanford’s chief financial officer James Davis and Pendergest-Holt alleging their involvement in a massive investment fraud.
Party ends
Before that happened, the small group of Stanford executives assembled in Miami and reviewed a broad set of facts about the company, facts that apparently led to serious concerns among some of the participants.
The female executive whose office Sjoblom entered that day in early February, for example, asked him why he wasn’t smiling.
“The party is over,” was his reply, according to court documents.
Earlier that day, a different Stanford official broke down crying over revelations about Stanford that had been shared during the Miami meetings. That person told members of the group nearby that details about Stanford might need to be given to appropriate authorities.
Sjoblom walked over and suggested the two of them begin praying together, according to court documents filed in Texas where the SEC’s case against Stanford is pending.
New details continue to emerge about how that circle of insiders who met in Miami reacted to the SEC’s tightening of the noose around Stanford, a group of companies that generated outsized wealth for its executives, projected an aura of respectability and success and was presided over by a Texas billionaire with a penchant for the game of cricket.
What wasn’t evident until the end was that Stanford was built on secrets and private financial transactions that culminated in the SEC accusing Stanford’s leadership of running a “massive Ponzi scheme” and of defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.
Two days after he told the Stanford executive “the party is over,” Sjoblom sent an e-mail to Mauricio Alvarado, Stanford’s general counsel. His proposed instructions regarding certificates of deposit and financial statements of Stanford’s banking arm revealed concerns about both of them.
Part of what the SEC claimed Stanford was doing was promising more inflated returns for its CDs than would have been available from CDs offered by traditional banks.
“All sales of CDs pursuant to the US Accredited Investor Program should cease,” Sjoblom’s Feb. 8 e-mail to Alvarado reads. “No further public distribution of the disclosure statement or the bank’s annual reports should occur. Nor should there be any distribution of any marketing materials that reference either (the Stanford bank or its CDs). All ongoing discussions with prospective clients about the bank’s CDs should cease.”
Tipping point
Two days after that, Sjoblom was in the room in the SEC’s office in Fort Worth, Texas, when Pendergest-Holt faced five representatives of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement to give testimony under oath in the SEC’s Stanford probe.
A native of Baldwyn, Miss., Pendergest-Holt worked in Stanford’s East Memphis office in the Crescent Center from the mid-1990s through 2007. She supervised a group of analysts spread from Memphis to Tupelo, Miss., to St. Croix in the U. S. Virgin Islands.
Sjoblom decided after Pendergest-Holt’s testimony to remove himself from the picture. He gave notice to the SEC Feb. 11, the day after Pendergest-Holt’s testimony, that his firm was no longer Stanford’s counsel.
He followed that up with a Feb. 12 fax to Kevin Edmundson, the assistant regional director in the SEC’s Forth Worth office, and left a voicemail message for him the next evening.
Sjoblom typed a note on his BlackBerry to Edmundson a little after 4 p.m. Feb. 14.
It read: “Kevin, this will advise the SEC, and confirm my voice message last evening, that I disaffirm all prior oral and written representations made by me and my associates ... to the SEC staff regarding Stanford Financial Group and its affiliates.”
The same day Sjoblom sent his Feb. 12 fax to Edmundson, Alvarado turned in his resignation to Stanford’s chairman.
“Dear Mr. Stanford,” the letter reads. “As you know, during meetings held in Miami last week (Feb. 2-6) with our outside attorney, Tom Sjoblom, and other employees of the company, Stanford’s CFO, James M. Davis, made verbal statements and presented other information which are completely opposite and in direct conflict to what I had been represented and led to believe during my entire tenure with the company. I am incredibly surprised and disappointed. Under these circumstances, I cannot continue in the position of general counsel of the Stanford Financial Group. I, therefore, tender my resignation effective immediately.”
Laura Pendergest-Holt, Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose - Post Source
http://www.memphisdailynews.com/editorial/Article.aspx?id=41397
Share
By Andy Meek
Print | Front Page | Email this story | Email reporter
Thomas Sjoblom, an attorney at the international law firm Proskauer Rose LLP, walked into the office of a female Stanford Financial Group executive in Miami after a tense series of private meetings earlier on a February day with Stanford’s top brass.
Sjoblom, an attorney representing Stanford, was part of a small group of executives who over the course of several days in early February were meeting in Miami to discuss the financial health and performance of the Stanford family of companies.
The meetings also were prep sessions for Laura Pendergest-Holt, Stanford’s chief investment officer who was scheduled to give testimony one week later to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which had for months been probing Stanford.
Those private meetings came amid the final, frantic days of the Stanford business empire. Fewer than two weeks later, the SEC in mid-February filed civil charges against Stanford chairman R. Allen Stanford, Stanford’s chief financial officer James Davis and Pendergest-Holt alleging their involvement in a massive investment fraud.
Party ends
Before that happened, the small group of Stanford executives assembled in Miami and reviewed a broad set of facts about the company, facts that apparently led to serious concerns among some of the participants.
The female executive whose office Sjoblom entered that day in early February, for example, asked him why he wasn’t smiling.
“The party is over,” was his reply, according to court documents.
Earlier that day, a different Stanford official broke down crying over revelations about Stanford that had been shared during the Miami meetings. That person told members of the group nearby that details about Stanford might need to be given to appropriate authorities.
Sjoblom walked over and suggested the two of them begin praying together, according to court documents filed in Texas where the SEC’s case against Stanford is pending.
New details continue to emerge about how that circle of insiders who met in Miami reacted to the SEC’s tightening of the noose around Stanford, a group of companies that generated outsized wealth for its executives, projected an aura of respectability and success and was presided over by a Texas billionaire with a penchant for the game of cricket.
What wasn’t evident until the end was that Stanford was built on secrets and private financial transactions that culminated in the SEC accusing Stanford’s leadership of running a “massive Ponzi scheme” and of defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.
Two days after he told the Stanford executive “the party is over,” Sjoblom sent an e-mail to Mauricio Alvarado, Stanford’s general counsel. His proposed instructions regarding certificates of deposit and financial statements of Stanford’s banking arm revealed concerns about both of them.
Part of what the SEC claimed Stanford was doing was promising more inflated returns for its CDs than would have been available from CDs offered by traditional banks.
“All sales of CDs pursuant to the US Accredited Investor Program should cease,” Sjoblom’s Feb. 8 e-mail to Alvarado reads. “No further public distribution of the disclosure statement or the bank’s annual reports should occur. Nor should there be any distribution of any marketing materials that reference either (the Stanford bank or its CDs). All ongoing discussions with prospective clients about the bank’s CDs should cease.”
Tipping point
Two days after that, Sjoblom was in the room in the SEC’s office in Fort Worth, Texas, when Pendergest-Holt faced five representatives of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement to give testimony under oath in the SEC’s Stanford probe.
A native of Baldwyn, Miss., Pendergest-Holt worked in Stanford’s East Memphis office in the Crescent Center from the mid-1990s through 2007. She supervised a group of analysts spread from Memphis to Tupelo, Miss., to St. Croix in the U. S. Virgin Islands.
Sjoblom decided after Pendergest-Holt’s testimony to remove himself from the picture. He gave notice to the SEC Feb. 11, the day after Pendergest-Holt’s testimony, that his firm was no longer Stanford’s counsel.
He followed that up with a Feb. 12 fax to Kevin Edmundson, the assistant regional director in the SEC’s Forth Worth office, and left a voicemail message for him the next evening.
Sjoblom typed a note on his BlackBerry to Edmundson a little after 4 p.m. Feb. 14.
It read: “Kevin, this will advise the SEC, and confirm my voice message last evening, that I disaffirm all prior oral and written representations made by me and my associates ... to the SEC staff regarding Stanford Financial Group and its affiliates.”
The same day Sjoblom sent his Feb. 12 fax to Edmundson, Alvarado turned in his resignation to Stanford’s chairman.
“Dear Mr. Stanford,” the letter reads. “As you know, during meetings held in Miami last week (Feb. 2-6) with our outside attorney, Tom Sjoblom, and other employees of the company, Stanford’s CFO, James M. Davis, made verbal statements and presented other information which are completely opposite and in direct conflict to what I had been represented and led to believe during my entire tenure with the company. I am incredibly surprised and disappointed. Under these circumstances, I cannot continue in the position of general counsel of the Stanford Financial Group. I, therefore, tender my resignation effective immediately.”
Laura Pendergest-Holt, Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose - Post Source
http://www.memphisdailynews.com/editorial/Article.aspx?id=41397
Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose - Japanese Investors Fraud - Martin Armstrong Client
"Thomas Sjoblom resigned from Proskauer Rose in August, according to the National Law Journal. Sjoblom, as you’ll recall, is the lawyer who stood next to Stanford Capital CIO Laura Pendergest-Holt while she was meeting with the SEC. She thought he was her lawyer, he gave a less-than-clear answer that he represented her to the extent it was covered by his representation of the client. She sued him and the firm in March and has since been indicted on obstruction charges.
That wasn’t enough to scare Sjoblom off, though. He held on for a few more months.
His resignation, a fascinating client of his, and the background of the other lawyer who has resigned in the scandal after the jump.
Sjoblom, a white-collar litigator who spent 20 years at the SEC, resigned in the wake of the guilty plea by former Stanford CFO James Davis. That plea “appeared to implicate Sjoblom in a conspiracy to thwart a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the alleged fraud.” Between the SEC and Proskauer, he was also a partner at Chadbourne & Parke, which has since been added as a defendant in a suit by investors claiming that the firms (through Sjoblom) assisted Stanford in perpetrating a fraud.
In addition to adding Chadbourne, the class action also added Mauricio Alvarado, the company’s former general counsel, as a defendant. Alvarado was a lawyer in Colombia before coming to the US to get law degrees. Curiously, he first got an LLM from LSU, in “International Documentary Credit Transactions” in 1988. He then went and got his JD from South Texas College of Law in 1990. While he was studying for his JD he was an associate at Vinson & Elkins, though. He left V&E in 1991 for Amoco, where he stayed until 1999.
Sjoblom’s profile has obviously been removed from the firm’s site, but as we so often say, thanks to the wonders of the Internet Archive, nothing is ever lost. You can see his last profile, which was current as of July 3, here.
Sjoblom has a number of interesting clients. Our favorite is Martin Armstrong, who was just profiled in the New Yorker last week. Armstrong spent seven years in jail on civil contempt charges without a trial and then was sentenced to five more for defrauding Japanese Investors. But what really makes him interesting is his fascination with cycles
[Armstrong] opened a forecasting firm called Princeton Economics International, based in Princeton, New Jersey. His model singled out, in advance, the day of the October, 1987, crash. “Never did I expect this to work on such a precise time level,” he wrote later, in an essay called “Understanding the Real Economy.” “It made no sense. I personally assumed it was just a fluke. This took place on the minor halfway point up the first leg of the 8.6-year cycle, at 2.15 years.”
Afterward, he was messing around with numbers and realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. The cycle mystery had deepened. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets, or the fluctuations in human behavior and mood that manifested themselves in the markets.
It was, after all, the magic number associated with the swing of a pendulum, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Why not the vast monuments of data known as the financial markets? “Suddenly I saw it in my mind’s eye,” he wrote. “There was a Geometry of Time itself.
And the story just gets better from there, with the CIA, the Japanese investors, and the Fibonacci sequence all making appearances. "
Source of Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose Post
http://lawshucks.com/2009/10/sjoblom-resigned-from-proskauer/
Got a Tip?
Crystal@CrystalCox.com
That wasn’t enough to scare Sjoblom off, though. He held on for a few more months.
His resignation, a fascinating client of his, and the background of the other lawyer who has resigned in the scandal after the jump.
Sjoblom, a white-collar litigator who spent 20 years at the SEC, resigned in the wake of the guilty plea by former Stanford CFO James Davis. That plea “appeared to implicate Sjoblom in a conspiracy to thwart a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the alleged fraud.” Between the SEC and Proskauer, he was also a partner at Chadbourne & Parke, which has since been added as a defendant in a suit by investors claiming that the firms (through Sjoblom) assisted Stanford in perpetrating a fraud.
In addition to adding Chadbourne, the class action also added Mauricio Alvarado, the company’s former general counsel, as a defendant. Alvarado was a lawyer in Colombia before coming to the US to get law degrees. Curiously, he first got an LLM from LSU, in “International Documentary Credit Transactions” in 1988. He then went and got his JD from South Texas College of Law in 1990. While he was studying for his JD he was an associate at Vinson & Elkins, though. He left V&E in 1991 for Amoco, where he stayed until 1999.
Sjoblom’s profile has obviously been removed from the firm’s site, but as we so often say, thanks to the wonders of the Internet Archive, nothing is ever lost. You can see his last profile, which was current as of July 3, here.
Sjoblom has a number of interesting clients. Our favorite is Martin Armstrong, who was just profiled in the New Yorker last week. Armstrong spent seven years in jail on civil contempt charges without a trial and then was sentenced to five more for defrauding Japanese Investors. But what really makes him interesting is his fascination with cycles
[Armstrong] opened a forecasting firm called Princeton Economics International, based in Princeton, New Jersey. His model singled out, in advance, the day of the October, 1987, crash. “Never did I expect this to work on such a precise time level,” he wrote later, in an essay called “Understanding the Real Economy.” “It made no sense. I personally assumed it was just a fluke. This took place on the minor halfway point up the first leg of the 8.6-year cycle, at 2.15 years.”
Afterward, he was messing around with numbers and realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. The cycle mystery had deepened. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets, or the fluctuations in human behavior and mood that manifested themselves in the markets.
It was, after all, the magic number associated with the swing of a pendulum, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Why not the vast monuments of data known as the financial markets? “Suddenly I saw it in my mind’s eye,” he wrote. “There was a Geometry of Time itself.
And the story just gets better from there, with the CIA, the Japanese investors, and the Fibonacci sequence all making appearances. "
Source of Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose Post
http://lawshucks.com/2009/10/sjoblom-resigned-from-proskauer/
Got a Tip?
Crystal@CrystalCox.com
Thomas Sjoblom Criminal? Was Proskuaer Rose Big Boys in on this with Thomas Sjoblom?
"The WSJ and others have reported that Proskauer Rose’s Thomas Sjoblom resigned from representing Allen Stanford and his companies on Feb. 14, three days before the SEC filed suit against Stanford and others, alleging an $8 billion fraud. (Click here for the WSJ story; here for the Bloomberg story.)
According to the Journal and others, Sjoblom, a Proskauer litigator and former Law Blog Lawyer of the Day sent a note to the SEC in which he said, “I disaffirm all prior oral and written representations made by me and my associates to the SEC staff regarding Stanford Financial Group and its affiliates.”
Did Sjoblom do the right thing in withdrawing his representation? Sjoblom did not respond to a call from the Law Blog. But according to this nice piece by AmLaw’s Zach Lowe, it sounds like Sjoblom had the law on his side.
According to Lowe, the issue of when lawyers need to withdraw from representation of a client is governed by two separate regimes: state rules regarding lawyer ethics, as well as the federal Sarbanes-Oxley law. Lowe reports that SOX actually makes life easier for lawyers in such predicaments, because it explicitly allows them to reveal confidential client information to investigators if that attorney believes that doing so will prevent a violation of the law or help rectify losses investors have already suffered. There’s even a colorful name for what Sjoblom is alleged to have done: the “noisy withdrawal.”
Said NYU law professor and ethics expert Stephen Gillers: “He did the right thing here.”
Source of Thomas Sjoblom Proskuaer Rose Post
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/02/19/sizing-up-thomas-sjobloms-noisy-withdrawal/
Stephen Gillers is sure a Jackass.. “He did the right thing here.” - What? Obviously Thomas Sjoblom of Proskauer Rose was involved in helping Allen Stanford hide money, cover up crimes best he could... Come on did the right thing.. um ya.. years to LATE...
According to the Journal and others, Sjoblom, a Proskauer litigator and former Law Blog Lawyer of the Day sent a note to the SEC in which he said, “I disaffirm all prior oral and written representations made by me and my associates to the SEC staff regarding Stanford Financial Group and its affiliates.”
Did Sjoblom do the right thing in withdrawing his representation? Sjoblom did not respond to a call from the Law Blog. But according to this nice piece by AmLaw’s Zach Lowe, it sounds like Sjoblom had the law on his side.
According to Lowe, the issue of when lawyers need to withdraw from representation of a client is governed by two separate regimes: state rules regarding lawyer ethics, as well as the federal Sarbanes-Oxley law. Lowe reports that SOX actually makes life easier for lawyers in such predicaments, because it explicitly allows them to reveal confidential client information to investigators if that attorney believes that doing so will prevent a violation of the law or help rectify losses investors have already suffered. There’s even a colorful name for what Sjoblom is alleged to have done: the “noisy withdrawal.”
Said NYU law professor and ethics expert Stephen Gillers: “He did the right thing here.”
Source of Thomas Sjoblom Proskuaer Rose Post
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/02/19/sizing-up-thomas-sjobloms-noisy-withdrawal/
Stephen Gillers is sure a Jackass.. “He did the right thing here.” - What? Obviously Thomas Sjoblom of Proskauer Rose was involved in helping Allen Stanford hide money, cover up crimes best he could... Come on did the right thing.. um ya.. years to LATE...
Thomas Sjoblom - Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose, Allen Stanford, SEC Complaint,
Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose, Allen Stanford, SEC Complaint Links and Resources
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/02/19/sizing-up-thomas-sjobloms-noisy-withdrawal/
Proskauer Rose involved in aiding and abetting a criminal??? 8 Billion .. Gee you think Proskauer Rose did not know this.. how about Allen Fagin, what Does Allen Fagin and Joseph Leccese have to say about this?
http://lawshucks.com/2009/10/sjoblom-resigned-from-proskauer/
Thomas Sjoblom resigned from Proskauer Rose in August, according to the National Law Journal. Sjoblom, as you’ll recall, is the lawyer who stood next to Stanford Capital CIO Laura Pendergest-Holt while she was meeting with the SEC. She thought he was her lawyer, he gave a less-than-clear answer that he represented her to the extent it was covered by his representation of the client. She sued him and the firm in March and has since been indicted on obstruction charges.
http://www.memphisdailynews.com/editorial/Article.aspx?id=41397
http://iviewit.tv/wordpress/?p=307
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/stanford-attorney-thomas_n_167798.html
http://www.proskauersucks.com/2010/01/thomas-v-sjoblom-allen-stanford.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/staford-fall-out-partner-leaves-proskauer-and-chadbourne-sued-2009-10
http://lawyergossip.com/2009/09/10/investors-accuse-lawyer-of-aiding-financier-in-fraud/
http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/06/stanford.html
Much more Coming Soon on Thomas Sjoblom and Proskauer Rose, as I Believe their are a whole lot of Proskauer Rose Attorneys involved in this scandal and they hid lots of money... just in my opinion..
Lots Coming Soon on ... Sooooo MUCH
Got a Tip on Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose
Crystal@CrystalCox.com
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/02/19/sizing-up-thomas-sjobloms-noisy-withdrawal/
Proskauer Rose involved in aiding and abetting a criminal??? 8 Billion .. Gee you think Proskauer Rose did not know this.. how about Allen Fagin, what Does Allen Fagin and Joseph Leccese have to say about this?
http://lawshucks.com/2009/10/sjoblom-resigned-from-proskauer/
Thomas Sjoblom resigned from Proskauer Rose in August, according to the National Law Journal. Sjoblom, as you’ll recall, is the lawyer who stood next to Stanford Capital CIO Laura Pendergest-Holt while she was meeting with the SEC. She thought he was her lawyer, he gave a less-than-clear answer that he represented her to the extent it was covered by his representation of the client. She sued him and the firm in March and has since been indicted on obstruction charges.
http://www.memphisdailynews.com/editorial/Article.aspx?id=41397
http://iviewit.tv/wordpress/?p=307
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/stanford-attorney-thomas_n_167798.html
http://www.proskauersucks.com/2010/01/thomas-v-sjoblom-allen-stanford.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/staford-fall-out-partner-leaves-proskauer-and-chadbourne-sued-2009-10
http://lawyergossip.com/2009/09/10/investors-accuse-lawyer-of-aiding-financier-in-fraud/
http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/06/stanford.html
Much more Coming Soon on Thomas Sjoblom and Proskauer Rose, as I Believe their are a whole lot of Proskauer Rose Attorneys involved in this scandal and they hid lots of money... just in my opinion..
Lots Coming Soon on ... Sooooo MUCH
Got a Tip on Thomas Sjoblom, Proskauer Rose
Crystal@CrystalCox.com
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