I find this to be a bit of dishonest/lazy reporting. It’s making an inference absent a direct question. I think/hope that the answer to the question who do you have a more favorable opinion of, Nancy Pelosi or Kim Jong Un? would be different.
Kris Kobach, former Kansas Governor and head of Trump’s voting “fraud” commission before it fell apart, lost a lawsuit today. The judge struck down a Kansas voter ID law championed by Kobach.
But that’s not all. Kobach himself defended the law in court. By all accounts he did a terrible job of it, such a terrible job that the judge ordered him back to school. Literally:
Robinson’s decision recounted the number of procedural issues Kobach and his legal team ran into over the course of the proceedings, which included his failed attempt to introduce new internal state voter registration statistics on the eve of the trial, instead of during the typical discovery process, as well as a rules he broke in introducing various witness testimonies.
She said that Kobach showed “a pattern and practice” of ” flaunting disclosure and discovery rules that are designed to prevent prejudice and surprise at trial,” prompting her to impose sanctions on him — specifically six hours of legal education, beyond those required by his law license, focusing on trial procedure.
I felt like this belonged in two threads as the Fascist ideological twinning becomes more cemented and clear (Republican party and Nazi party):
The resemblance is striking, just like their ideologies:
It’s really not. US insider trading law is particularly dumb, but I don’t think he’d be guilty of it in any regime I’m familiar with. There’s no inside information about the company being traded on here. Even assuming for the sake of argument that he traded because he knew about the story, having advance word of a negative story about a company is not the same as receiving inside information. Nor is it illegal to simply trade on inside information! There has to be some kind of real or theoretical quid- pro-quo involved, although the US jurisprudence swings all over the place as to what that actually entails. From what I’ve read, there’s no question of a quid-pro-quo here - it’s not like the reporter traded the details in the story with Ross for some other information, let alone direct financial gain.
Timex
3464
Ah, I think it is, isn’t it?
If you know ahead of time that a story is about to come out about a company that is going to impact its stock price, and you act on that, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal. Totally could be a misconception on my part though.
Menzo
3465
From Wikipedia:
In 2000, the SEC enacted SEC Rule 10b5-1, which defined trading “on the basis of” inside information as any time a person trades while aware of material nonpublic information. It is no longer a defense for one to say that one would have made the trade anyway. The rule also created an affirmative defense for pre-planned trades.
So yeah, if you have information that is not public, you are not allowed to trade on it.
It is a misconception. There’s a potential for it being illegal if the source of the story containing material non-public information was an insider, and the information was given in some kind of quid pro quo (or to benefit eg a family member). But a negative story in general? Absolutely not. And even if it’s a negative story from an insider, if you don’t have the quid-pro-quo, it’s not illegal. It’s really, really hard to establish insider trading to a criminal standard.
There is an awful lot of jurisprudence since 2000 which says that’s not the case.
Also, note the important caveat of “in breach of a duty of trust or confidence that is owed directly, indirectly, or derivatively, to the issuer of that security or the shareholders of that issuer, or to any other person who is the source of the material nonpublic information”. You do not owe a duty to the issuer of a security if someone rings you up and tells you they’re going to write a story about that issuer.
In certain fact patterns, there may be a person in the chain of information that did owe such a duty and breached it, so, like I said above, there can be cases where trading on an unpublished story would expose people to insider trading prosecution, but it’s by no means a blanket thing. And in the Ross case, it doesn’t even approach that sort of fact pattern. Indeed, from the Forbes article, there’s not even an assertion that someone told him they were going to write a story.
rowe33
3468
I’m not sure if what he did was technically illegal from an “insider trading” standpoint but it’s balls deep in the toilet from an ethics standpoint. Given what Pruitt has gotten away with, seems like Ross will easily skate past this one as well. This administration is far and away the most morally corrupt one we’ve ever had in the U.S.
That’s not how that saying is supposed to work!
rowe33
3471
I thought it worked well in describing my feelings on the current administration and its minions. Evokes a certain imagery that fit well!
See here for a discussion of some of the recent precedents. As I say, they’re all over the place.
That’s a separate matter, though even there I’m not convinced in this case (I have all sorts of issues with Ross in general). He’s given an explanation and while I haven’t fact checked it, it is at least facially plausible. Not least because it’s a really terrible insider trade if it was deliberate. Looking at it ex post facto, the stock fell 4% in 11 days after the story was published, according to the Forbes piece. That’s really not a move to make a fortune off. I’d be willing to bet it was well within the expected random walk over a given 11-day period. And Navigator’s connections to Sibur were disclosed in its public accounts, so other than Ross’s own investment (not obviously a negative for the stock in itself), the Paradise Papers were kind of a nothingburger on that front.
rowe33
3474
His explanation is just bullshit though. The “idea” that he still held the shares is what he was worried about? There was absolutely no reason to sell short on these.
But yes, compared to all the other corruption piling up these days, the stench of this one is just a wisp of rot in a hurricane.
In a statement, Mr. Ross, 80, said he had been in the process of divesting his holdings in Navigator when he discovered shares he did not know he had in an account set up by the company. He said because the shares were in “electronic form” he could not access them right away.
“I decided to continue selling those shares, but since I did not have physical possession of them in order to make delivery in the required time period, I technically sold them short,” he said, adding that later, when he obtained the share certificates, he delivered them to the broker to close out the transaction.
“Therefore,” Mr. Ross said, “it made no economic difference to me whether the shares went up or down between the sale date and the date I delivered them.”
It is not clear how a short sale would have accomplished Mr. Ross’s objective of divestment. Theodore Kassinger, a lawyer for Mr. Ross, said Mr. Ross thought a short sale would “eliminate the idea that he still held the shares” before he was able to dispose of them.
I don’t support this kind of age shaming.
boom. well played, well played.
I’ve not heard anal sex described thus before.
He was legally required to divest them. Taking the factual assertions in his statement at face value, what he did was a way to achieve the economic effect of divestment when it was, so he says, practically impossible to do so.
Like I say, I don’t know whether the factual context is true, but if it is, the reasoning doesn’t seem implausible, or unethical.
