New York Times, DealBook
"The Curious Case of Nelson Obus"
June 4, 2011

Business law professor Robert Prentice spoke to the New York Times about the Securities and Exchange Commission's apparent renewed focus on prosecuting insider trading, such as the case of former hedge fund manager Nelson Obus, an investigation that has been going on nearly a decade and remains unsettled:

Many ordinary Americans wonder why more Wall Street highfliers are not in trouble — or behind bars — after all those taxpayer bailouts and mortgage shenanigans.

Few people, aside from the accused, argue that the authorities should go easy on financial black hats who swindled investors. To the contrary: many say the S.E.C. and others have not been tough enough. Next to the fiascos of the financial collapse, insider trading almost seems old-fashioned. Some legal experts suspect the S.E.C. is pursuing insider trading cases to, in effect, make up for past failures, like sleeping through the huge Ponzi scheme that Bernard L. Madoff ran for so long.

“Regulators didn’t do well with the Ponzi schemes, with the Madoffs of the world,” says Robert A. Prentice, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Insider trading cases are something they know how to do.”

Read the full article at the New York Times website.