Penelope A. Graboys Blair

Partner
Securities Litigation & Regulatory Enforcement
(415) 773-5492
pgraboysblair@orrick.com
Read full biography at www.orrick.com

Penelope Graboys Blair, a partner in the San Francisco office, is a member of the Securities Litigation and Regulatory Enforcement Group.  Ms. Blair is also a member of the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Task Force and the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) Litigation Task Force.

Ms. Blair's practice focuses on the defense of government enforcement actions and securities litigation.  She represents public companies, officers and directors, and other market participants in class action litigation, challenges to corporate governance, and other matters involving allegations of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty.  Ms. Blair defends and conducts internal investigations for those subject to enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice, and other government agencies and self-regulatory organizations. Ms. Blair is among a small number of lawyers in the country who have defended a securities class action trial to verdict.  Representative cases include the following:

  • Represents the former President of Countrywide Financial Corporation, the nation's largest mortgage lender, in connection with investigations by and litigation with the SEC and the California Attorney General, and related class action and derivative litigation including multiple suits by equity and debt holders, pool insurers and  investors in RMBS in multiple jurisdictions.
  • Conducted internal investigation of the China offices of a U.S. technology company on allegations of fraud.
  • Facebook, Inc. v. Eduardo Saverin: One of the two partners representing Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Inc., in litigation arising from claims of breach of fiduciary duty, fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets.
  • Represented multiple companies and board committees in stock option fraud investigations by the SEC and various U.S. Attorney offices and in class action and derivative litigation.
  • Conducted internal investigation into allegations of fraud in the China offices of a U.S. technology company.
  • Represented Siebel Systems, Inc. in a securities class action and prevailed on motion to dismiss with prejudice, and affirmed on appeal in Ninth Circuit.
  • Represented a mutual fund company in market timing investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office and the SEC.
  • Represented a former chief financial officer in a widely publicized financial and accounting fraud litigation including multiple securities class actions, derivative suits, ERISA cases, Congressional hearings and SEC proceeding arising from public company's multi-year restatement of financial statements.
  • Represented nVidia in class action and derivative suits arising from restatement of financials and prevailed on motions to dismiss with prejudice.
  • Represented Nike in securities class actions and prevailed in motion to dismiss and favorable settlement.
  • Served on trial team in Howard v. Everex Systems, Inc., (N.D. Cal) a securities class action and obtained a jury verdict for the defense.
  • Represented a board of directors in multiple lawsuits by shareholders of an acquired company and ultimately secured dismissal with prejudice.

Ms. Graboys Blair is a frequent lecturer on issues involving securities matters and class action litigation.

Penelope Blair

Posts by Penelope A. Graboys Blair

SEC

Record SEC Settlement in S.A.C. Capital Investigation. Well….Kind Of.

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On April 16, 2013, Judge Victor Marrero conditionally approved a $600 million consent judgment between the SEC and CR Intrinsic Investors LLC (“CR”) where CR “neither admitted nor denied” the allegations brought against it. The settlement was on the heels of a highly publicized investigation and lawsuit regarding CR’s purported insider trading scheme involving S.A.C. Capital Advisors and former S.A.C. trader Mathew Martoma. Despite finding the proposed injunctive and monetary relief “fair, adequate, and reasonable, and in the public interest,” Judge Marrero questioned the appropriateness of the “neither admit nor deny” provisions because of the extraordinary public and private harm caused by CR’s alleged wrongful conduct.

Approval of the CR settlement was conditioned upon the outcome of the pending Second Circuit appeal in S.E.C. v. Citigroup Global Markets, Inc., 11-cv-5227 (2d Cir.). In Citigroup, Judge Rakoff (of the Southern District of New York) denied approval of the SEC’s proposed settlement of fraud charges against Citigroup. Rakoff’s opinion harshly critiqued the agency’s use of “no admission” settlements as imposing “substantial relief on the basis of mere allegations.” He questioned whether “no admission” settlements could be properly judged when the Court did not know the relevant facts and therefore “lack[ed] a framework for determining adequacy.” Both Citigroup and the SEC appealed Rakoff’s decision to the Second Circuit, where the decision remains pending. Read More

SEC

The Revolving Door Spins Again

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On January 24, President Obama announced his nominee for Chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission – Mary Jo White, a former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

By selecting White, the President is signaling an interest in seeing a more forceful approach at the Commission. Indeed, if confirmed, White will be the first former criminal prosecutor to head the SEC. Previous SEC chairs, by contrast, had established careers in private legal practice, in academia, in business, and in government, either as legislators or, in the case of Harvey Pitt, as general counsel to the SEC (before his long career in private legal practice) — but not as criminal prosecutors. Although White has little regulatory or policymaking experience, she brings to the table a wealth of experience in enforcement, which has been a top priority for the SEC in recent years.

As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1993 to 2002, White is best known for winning convictions for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa as well as for winning the conviction of mobster John Gotti. The President emphasized, “Today . . . there are rules to end taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailouts once and for all. But it’s not enough to change the law. We also need cops on the beat to enforce the law.” Read More

SEC

Pick Your Poison: Regulators Find Overvalued Assets, Securities Fraud, and Insider Trading at Failed Thrift

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In a case involving all of the hallmarks of the housing and economic crisis, on September 25, 2012 the SEC announced that it had charged three Nebraska bank executives and the CEO’s son with violations of securities fraud and insider trading laws stemming from subprime lending, undercapitalization, and the ultimate demise of TierOne Bank.

TierOne Bank was a century-old thrift that had traditionally focused on loans to the agricultural and residential sectors in Midwestern states, but like many banks caught up in the housing boom, in 2004 TierOne expanded into riskier loans in then-exploding markets such as Nevada, Florida, and Arizona. All of these markets would collapse just a few years later, leaving banks like TierOne with significant losses on their books. As a result, in June 2008, the Office of Thrift Supervision gave TierOne a choice: maintain elevated core and risk-based capital ratios or face enforcement action—the top leaders at TierOne allegedly chose neither.

Rather than increase capital ratios or accept an OTS enforcement action, CEO Gilbert Lundstrom, COO James Laphen, and Chief Credit Officer Don Langford allegedly materially understated TierOne’s loan and OREO losses. Not to be confused with the cookie, “OREO” in the banking context refers to “other real estate owned”—in this case real estate that TierOne had repossessed. Though TierOne was left holding real estate from failed markets around the country, its executives allegedly ignored the fact that the value of these assets was based on stale and inadequately discounted appraisals, and consequently made misstatements in its 2008 10-K and a number of other filings. Read More

Dodd-Frank Act

The Tip Is In the Mail: Court Tries to Make Sense of Dodd-Frank’s Whistleblower and Retaliation Provisions and Asks Whether It’s Enough Just to Send a Letter

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In what may be one of the first Dodd-Frank retaliation claims to make it past a motion to dismiss, a federal court on September 25, 2012 issued a ruling attempting to harmonize the definition of “whistleblower” under the landmark statute with its protections against employer retaliation for engaging in whistleblower activities. Acting in accord with the SEC’s final rule on the statute as well as opinions from the few federal courts to have weighed in on the subject, the court sided with the alleged whistleblower.

For some eighteen years, Richard Kramer had served as the vice president of human resources and administration at Trans-Lux Corporation. In that role, he had a number of responsibilities related to Trans-Lux’s ERISA-governed pension plan. Concerned with what he saw as conflicts of interest and deficiencies in the pension plan committee’s composition and reporting, Kramer went to Trans-Lux’s leadership and later the board’s audit committee to sound the alarm. Kramer eventually sent a letter to the SEC the old-fashioned way—by regular mail—a choice that would later have significance in the case.

Within hours of Kramer reaching out to Trans-Lux’s audit committee with his concerns, Trans-Lux’s CEO and another Trans-Lux employee reprimanded Kramer, and went downhill from there: Kramer’s staff was reassigned, an investigation into him was launched by Trans-Lux’s in-house counsel, his responsibilities were diminished, and he was eventually terminated. Kramer later sued Trans-Lux, claiming among other things that the Company had retaliated against him in violation of Dodd-Frank. Trans-Lux moved to dismiss. Read More

SEC

GAO Tells the SEC Its FINRA Oversight is B-A-D

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A recent report released by the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) last week concluded that the SEC can improve its oversight of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”), a self-regulatory organization charged with policing securities broker-dealers. The GAO’s criticism of the SEC is a politically hot issue because Congress is currently considering whether to shift authority for overseeing investment advisors from the SEC to FINRA—the subordinate organization the SEC is purportedly doing a poor job of overseeing.

The GAO report was a product of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which required the GAO to study the SEC’s oversight of FINRA. In particular, the report examined (1) how the SEC has conducted its oversight of FINRA in the past; including FINRA rule proposals and the effectiveness of its rules; and (2) how the SEC plans to enhance its oversight of FINRA.

The report concluded that that while the SEC routinely inspects many of FINRA’s programs, it does not conduct any retrospective review, i.e., it does not review whether FINRA’s rules are actually effective.  In fact, the report concluded that the SEC does not even have a process for retrospective review.

Significantly, the GAO report also concluded that the SEC had conducted virtually no review of FINRA operations aimed at executive compensation and corporate governance issues. The SEC claimed it had purposefully overlooked compensation and governance operations because of competing priorities and resource constraints, and instead had focused its resources on FINRA’s regulatory departments, which the SEC perceived as programs with the greatest impact on investors.

Given these and other conclusions, the GAO recommended that the SEC “encourage FINRA to conduct retrospective reviews of its rules” as well as establish its own process for examining FINRA reviews. It further recommended that the SEC utilize a risk-management framework in developing its future oversight plans.