The litigation industry looks solid for 2013, with many thanks to Wall Street houses and uber banks. According to Peter Henning at DealBook, financial fraud and insider trading cases will remain active in 2013. The entire article provides a cogent summary – it leads off with the following prediction, which seems inarguably correct:
"It is not really of question of whether there will be a major white-collar crime that captures the public’s attention in 2013; it’s a question of when and how costly it will be.
If the cases of 2012 can serve as a guide, too many loopholes in the system allow fraud to go undetected.
Take for instance the onetime futures trading firm PFGBest, whose founder confessed to having committed fraud for years at the company, which has about $200 million missing from its accounts. Though futures regulators have spent months wringing their hands on how such a fraud could have gone on for so long, the fact remains that some financiers may keep one step ahead of law enforcement when it comes to white-collar crimes.
Federal prosecutors, however, are likely to remain strongly focused on the insider trading cases. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan has already racked up an impressive record of winning convictions in every insider trading case that went to trial. They are even winning cases the old-fashioned way by relying primarily on the testimony of cooperating witnesses."
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