Getty ImagesAllen StanfordA former regional enforcement director with the Securities and Exchange Commission who allegedly derailed repeated attempts to investigate convicted Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford and then tried to represent Stanford in private practice has been barred from practicing before the Commission for one year, the SEC said.Spencer Barasch, 54, a partner at Andrews Kurth, previously agreed to pay a $50,000 civil penalty to the Justice Department to settle allegations he violated federal conflict of interest laws.Barasch was a top enforcement attorney in the SEC’s Fort Worth office beginning in 1998, around the time the office began receiving complaints about Stanford. An internal investigation found Barasch repeatedly rebuffed other staffers’ requests to investigate Stanford. After Barasch left the Commission in 2005 for private practice, he ... Continue reading →

U.S. authorities are ratcheting up their investigation of residential mortgage-backed securities — the bundles of mortgages that were at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. And they are appealing to the public for help. Getty ImagesThe Justice Department on Thursday announced new resources for the so-called “RMBS Working Group,” a multi-agency task force formed in January that includes federal prosecutors, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York state attorney general’s office. The defaults of millions of home mortgages that had been packaged together and sold as residential mortgage-backed securities or RMBS helped plunge the world into a deep recession, but there have been few prosecutions, in part because insiders have not been willing to step forward. So now, the group has launched ... Continue reading →