Essay Martha Stewart's Insider Trading

The fact that the insider trading charges were thrown out, but the conspiracy charges stuck is curious. It appears, yet again, the judicial process and mainstream social construct of acceptable behavior collided with what Martha, her broker, and fellow investor touted as ‘nothing wrong’. Knowing more of John Savarrese’s role as Martha’s pretrial counsel, gives two more important points about Martha’s case of white collar crime. The first is questionable ethics and the other is arrogance. Mr. Savarrese has been criticized by legal analysts for not providing ethical legal advice to Martha or making the right professional choices himself. The belief is that Savarrese knew or at least suspected, Martha and Bacanovic planned to perjure themselves. As Martha’s legal counselor it was ethically negligent of Savarrese not to advise Martha of the legal repercussions of lying to the SEC. If Martha insisted on presenting her fraudulent story, Savarrese should have immediately withdrawn as her counsel (Hoffman, 2007). More importantly than if Savarrese knew or not, in her arrogance, Martha never thought this issue of a mere $45, 637 would develop into charges nor a prison sentence! She was simply above the laws and saw no reason to tell the

Introduction: Bernie Madoff was a well-respected financier, his company Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC was very well known and even helped launch the Nasdaq stock market. Madoffs company was well trusted and he even had celebrity cliental such a Steven Spielberg, Kevin bacon, and Kyra Sedgwick. Madoff came from a low income family however, he was able to start his company from getting a $50,000 loan from his in-laws and he using money that he had saved from side jobs such as lifeguarding and installing sprinkler systems to found his company. The successfulness of Madoff’s company came from the company’s ability to adapt to change and us modern day computer technology. As his business grew he stated employing family members to help “His younger brother, Peter, joined him in the business in 1970 and became the firm 's chief compliance officer. Later, Madoff 's sons, Andrew and Mark, also worked for the company as traders. Peter 's daughter, Shana, became a rules-compliance lawyer for the trading division of her uncle 's firm, and his son, Roger, joined the firm before his death in 2006”(Bernard Madoff Biography 2016) Unfortunately on December 11th 2008 Bernie Madoff became well known for a whole new reason. He had been accused of performing an elaborate Ponzi scheme and he had been reported to the federal authorities by his own sons. A year later he admitted to the investigators that he had lost $50 billion dollars of his investors’ money and pled guilty to 11

Since 2002 Martha Stewart was investigated by the SEC and the FBI for Inside Trading but it is interesting that she wasn’t found guilty or accused on any of those charges; she was charge for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and false statement. It was her un-ethical behavior what drove her into innumerable allegations and public embarrassments. There are at least four issues in this case where ethics play a very interesting and critical role; Freedom of speech, Conspiracy, Right of property and Inside trading.

Fraud, lying, conspiracy...not terms that any individual generally wants associated with their history, nonetheless with their reputation and personality, especially if that individual happens to be Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart: a name which almost every person who calls themselves an American can recognize. Her name pronounces itself across cookbooks, magazines and even has its own show on Style and The Learning Channel. It now pronounces itself with yet another captivating theme, as part of one of America's major scandals.

In 1938, and in the teeth of the longest and fiercest depression that the United States had ever known, capital spending hit an all time high. That’s right! In 1938 the men who owned America began to pour millions of Dollars into new plant and equipment as if there was no tomorrow. We don’t think much about it today, because it has been a long time since the United States has experienced a real bone jolting economic slowdown. The fact is, however, that the very best time for the industrialist to invest in new technologies is in the middle of a depression. This is because it is at such times that labor, raw materials, and new equipment can be purchased at rock bottom prices. Henry Ford may have jumped the gun a bit. He shut down his River

Overview of the Case: The Securities and Exchange Commission claims Mark D. Begelman misused proprietary information regarding the merger of Bluegreen Corporation with BFC Financial Corporation. Mr. Begelman allegedly learned of the acquisition through a network of professional connections known as the World Presidents’ Organization (Maglich). Members of this organization freely share non-public business information with other members in confidence; however, Mr. Begelman allegedly did not abide by the organization’s mandate of secrecy and leveraged private information into a lucrative security transaction. As stated in the summary of the case by the SEC, “Mark D. Begelman, a member of the World Presidents’ Organization (“WPO”), abused

She took an opportunity when she received word that the company, ImClone was about to crash to remove 4,000 shares where she would avoid losing about 46k dollars. Investigation into the case and begun and developments in the case had started surfacing on the truths in the case. On December 27th, Martha Stewart told investigators that she was traveling on a trip when she called to check her messages and her broker had stated that the company had fallen under $60 per share so he sold them. According to the literature, Martha Stewart claims that she had set up a “stop-loss” order, which states if the shares fell below $60/share that they would be sold. Unfortunely, this was not the case when the broker’s assistant came forward and told Merrill Lynch that his boss had told him to lie about the “stop-loss” order. He started cooperating with federal investigators and later was fined and fired from the company along with his boss for the involvement they had in the scandal. On the other hand, after everything started falling apart, Martha Stewart later resigned from her board at the New York Stock Exchange. Later in August, investigators begin building their case against Martha Stewart in her involvement with inside trading and lying about the “stop-loss” order. Investigators reached out to Stewart’s lawyers but later made a statement that Martha Stewart would be pleading the Fifth Amendment and keeping quit about anything to do with the case. As a result, the SEC filed charges against Martha Stewart, and she was found guilty on four counts of obstructing justice and lying to federal investigators. On June 17, 2004, Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and two years of supervised release along with a healthy fine attached. Till this day, Martha Stewart pleads her innocence and states that she did not do anything wrong. She is currently making a comeback with her company and

However, it is perhaps not entirely right to say that your actions, or what you have been accused of, have nothing to do with MSO. Joan Didion, in her essay “Everywoman.com,” suggests how your reputation is integral to MSO, and she quotes from MSO’s 1999 prospectus: “Our (MSO’s) business would be adversely affected if Martha Stewart’s public image or reputation were to be tarnished” (146). Indeed, a New York Times article by Constance L. Hays, dated 1 May 2003, reports that MSO’s “total revenue fell 14.6 percent in the first quarter” and that “the share price, battered after Ms. Stewart’s name surfaced in connection with the ImClone insider-trading investigation last summer, fell another 11.3 percent.” One could argue that MSO’s poor performance is necessarily due to the difficult state of the economy at present, but according to MSO’s accounts, your company was in fact posting growing revenue figures until you were implicated in the Imclone scandal. So as you can see, your public image is closely intertwined with the survival and prosperity of MSO. Your actions do indeed affect your stakeholders.

In the early 2000s, Stewart became the focus of headlines, speculation, and a federal investigation concerning her stock trading. She was accused of insider trading after she sold four thousand ImClone System’s shares one day before the firm’s stock price tumbled. The firm’s stock price plummeted as the Food and Drug Administration refused to review ImClone’s cancer drug Erbitux. Even though

During the investigation, Stewart lied to the SEC and FBI, saying that she had no knowledge of Waksal’s trade and that she had sold on a standing agreement with her broker to sell if shares traded below $60. Bacanovic corroborated the story, but his assistant Faneuil eventually came forward and revealed the truth (Leite, 2012). Later, Stewart’s own assistant, Annie Armstrong, testified that Stewart had tried to change a record of Bacanovic’s phone message to her about ImClone (Leite, 2012). The charge for illegal insider trading against Martha Stewart was ultimately dropped because she had no knowledge of the FDA’s decision on the drug, but she was sentenced to five months of prison time and forced to pay a fine of $195,000 for obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Stewart’s reputation was further tarnished as she was forced to step down as CEO of her company for five years, and resign her board member status at the New York Stock Exchange (Moffatt, 2015). The conviction damaged Stewart’s career and her company as the Martha Stewart Organization’s stock fell 22.6 percent after the crisis (Torossian,

In today’s society crime occurs everyday across all aspects of life. One particular crime is that of white collar and corporate level crime. It is important that we as a society study this type of crime in depth because many individuals believe that white collar and corporate level crimes are victimless crimes when in reality they have the potential to destroy major corporations and economies all with one single case. The news or media rarely talk about this type of crime because it is often difficult to understand and individuals typically lack interest in these types of cases. One particular case is that of Jordan Belfort. Dubbed the infamous “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort is a former stockbroker who robbed investors of over $200 million dollars to create his wealth through “pump and dump” schemes, insider trading, money laundering securities fraud, and stock-market manipulation. As an attempt to further understand these complex cases I will break down Belfort’s case as far as the methods and means as to how he got started, his use of “pump and dump” schemes and other means as to how he acquired his wealth. In addition to this I will discuss the sanctions and disciplinary action that Jordan Belfort was given, how the case affected society and what new regulations were

It can fairly be said that an Investor considering an investment decision (whether to purchase, sell or hold stock) in publicly traded company acts on the basis of extensive information which is available by corporation to him until the last moment of his investing decision and try to determine the fair price of corporate stock. In the light of continuous creation of a particular impression of corporate affairs by the corporation, new information by corporate can vanish the importance of previous available information to investor. In the scenario only one kind of investors can get advantage over others, who is either very close to corporate operation (corporate officers) or can access nonpublic price-sensitive information to corporation

Jordan Belfort is the notorious 1990’s stockbroker who saw himself earning fifty million dollars a year operating a penny stock boiler room from his Stratton Oakmont, Inc. brokerage firm. Corrupted by drugs, money, and sex, he went from being an innocent twenty – two year old on the fringe of a new life to manipulating the system in his infamous “pump and dump” scheme. As a stock swindler, he would motivate his young brokers through insane presentations to rile them up as they defrauded investors with duplicitous stock sales. Toward the end of this debauchery tale he was convicted for securities fraud and money laundering for which he was sentenced to twenty – two months in prison as well as recompensing two – hundred million in

The Stock Market is an organized market for the trading of stocks and bonds. In Europe a stock exchange is often called a bourse. Stock exchanges exist in all-important financial centers of the world. Members of an exchange buy and sell for themselves or for others, charging commissions. A stock may be traded only if it is listed on an exchange after having met certain requirements. The New York Stock Exchange (founded 1790) is the largest in the U.S., handling more than 70% (in market value) of all transactions. The American Stock Exchange (Amex), also in New York City, and regional exchanges account for the remainder. Unlisted shares, often of smaller companies, are traded in the growing over-the-counter

Insider trading refers to the trading of a listed company’s stock or other financial securities by individuals who has access to non-public material information about the company. This action often occurs within employees/ex-employees of the listen company. Information is considered to be non-public material information if making it public would affect the price of securities, and using such information in decisions to buy or sell financial securities would be unfair to non-insiders (Bainbridge, 2013). Insider trading is treated as a mischief in more than 90 countries, and defendants are imposed with penalties (Beny, 2012). Specific insider conduct regulations in New Zealand were first enacted in 1988, followed by amendments in 2002, 2006 and 2008. The insider conduct regimes between 1988 and 2008 are often considered as a failure due to weak enforcements. Thus in 2008, the regulator introduced a new regime, which was a close model to the Australian insider conduct legislation. Both regimes are expansive, meaning it could be applied to any person in possession of insider information. However, while the Australian laws were aggressively enforced (more than 26 prosecutions were brought since then), no prosecutions have been launched under the new legislation in New Zealand. In addition, New Zealand also had no convictions secured prior to 2008, illustrating a clear enforcement deficit in the New Zealand