Fucking gross
Spoiler: judge will do nothing
https://x.com/dougwahl1/status/1749983922719457361?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
I respect this play
Get covid
Tell work to FU I have covid
Still live your life
Henderson, the panel’s senior judge, had expressed opposition to taking up the case on an expedited basis and also had the most cryptic outlook based on her questions during oral arguments. As the most senior judge, she has the right to write the majority opinion if she’s in the majority. And even if she disagrees with her colleagues, she could potentially hold back the court’s ruling for weeks or months while she crafts a dissenting opinion.
There is no formal rule or policy at the appeals court that allows the majority on a panel to force the release of a ruling when another member of the panel hasn’t completed his or her opinion
Coming up on a month since the hearing and even if they drop the decision tomorrow we’re staring down the barrel of even longer delays from SCOTUS. I remember being assured that they were moving at “warp speed”. Lol law as always.
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An appeal normally takes like a year to hear. So yeah, warp speed.
It’s actually easier and faster to say what you need to say in a lot of words than it is to say it in fewer words.
Lol bankruptcy law
Wtf is the U.S. Judicial Conference?
So more LOLscotusdecides…!?
Buckle up for todays edition of LOL LAW NOTHING EVER HAPPENS TO RICH PEOPLE
Also Lawbros. Aren’t appeals courts supposed to defer to the trial courts findings of fact? LOL LAW
Mohamed Ali Rashid used to be a partner at Apollo Global Management Inc., the big private equity firm. As part of his job, he would fly around to visit companies in which he had made, or was considering making, investments on behalf of the private equity funds that Apollo manages. He spent a lot of money on flights, hotels and meals as he evaluated investments and monitored portfolio companies. Naturally he put all of these expenses on his Apollo corporate credit card. That’s why he had the card. He didn’t pay for his flights to monitor portfolio companies.
Neither, to be clear, did Apollo. Apollo, his firm, turned around and billed those expenses to the funds that it managed for investors or to the portfolio companies that it ran for those funds. Its limited partnership agreements with those funds said that the funds would pay for Apollo’s expenses “arising in connection with [the fund’s] operations and the acquisition, ownership, and maintenance of investments in Portfolio Companies.”[[1]](file:///private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/9083F0E8-CD88-402D-8488-D6BFA68DBF23/Gmail.app/#m_-1741360843896604824_footnote-1) And Rashid — or his assistant — had to fill out expense reports explaining each expense that he charged on his corporate card, and allocating each expense to a particular investment, so that Apollo could bill the expense to the right funds or companies.[[2]](file:///private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/9083F0E8-CD88-402D-8488-D6BFA68DBF23/Gmail.app/#m_-1741360843896604824_footnote-2)
So far this is totally normal, just the standard operating procedure for private equity firms. Less normally, Rashid also put hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal expenses on his corporate card, whoops. “During 2010, Rashid regularly charged expenses related to personal grooming services that he received at a high-end hair salon to his Apollo corporate credit card,” the US Securities and Exchange Commission said when it sued him for fraud in 2017. On his expense reports, he described these haircuts as “meals with management” of portfolio companies, but his assistant noticed that “there was no restaurant in New York with the name of the vendor on the credit card statement, but that a New York hair salon had that name.” She reported her suspicions to Apollo’s chief financial officer, who investigated and found other fake expenses; later a law firm investigation found even more fake expenses. Ultimately Rashid left and agreed to pay Apollo back $325,000 for these fake personal expenses.
And the SEC sued, because this is pretty obviously fraud. But what kind of fraud? The SEC sued Rashid for defrauding Apollo’s private equity funds, which ultimately paid the fake expenses.[[3]](file:///private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/9083F0E8-CD88-402D-8488-D6BFA68DBF23/Gmail.app/#m_-1741360843896604824_footnote-3) Apollo, the company, gave Rashid the credit card, but ultimately it billed his expenses to its clients, so the clients were the ones who were defrauded. And Rashid, as a senior partner at Apollo, was an adviser and a fiduciary for those funds, so the law prohibited him from defrauding them.
At trial, Rashid offered a clever defense: Yes, obviously, he was doing fraud. But he wasn’t doing fraud on the funds, because he didn’t know that his expenses would be billed to the funds. He just knew that Apollo gave him a credit card and paid the bill. As far as he knew, he was just defrauding Apollo, his employer, not the funds for which he was a fiduciary. “Rashid testified that he had believed that the expenses for which he sought reimbursement were paid by the Apollo-affiliated management companies, not the funds.”[[4]](file:///private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/9083F0E8-CD88-402D-8488-D6BFA68DBF23/Gmail.app/#m_-1741360843896604824_footnote-4)
This defense did not work at trial. The judge did not believe him, finding “that his testimony was ‘an after-the-fact construct to avoid liability.’” It does not sound especially plausible to me either. He had to submit expense reports that allocated each expense to some particular Apollo investment. The point of doing that was obviously so that Apollo could bill the expenses to the funds that made those investments. The judge concluded that at best he was at least “recklessly indifferent,” and so liable for fraud.
Rashid appealed, and yesterday he won. Here is a bizarre opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit finding that actually no private equity professional had any reason to think that his travel expenses would be billed to a fund, so Rashid couldn’t have been doing fraud on his funds:
Point of inquiry: When does the law allow fraud?
The law doesn’t allow fraud. This guy was just arguing that the kind of fraud he was doing was outside of the SEC’s jurisdiction, so they can’t sue him for it. And he reached an agreement with his employer to reimburse for fraudulent charges.
No, I get that. It’s just the part that I quoted seems superfluous. Like if he wasn’t a senior partner who was an advisor and a fiduciary, the law might not have prohibited him from defrauding them. It was a joke
I don’t think it’s superfluous to cite the exact law prohibiting him from defrauding his clients specifically because he is an advisor.
This is correct, the language might have been a bit sloppy but the idea was that they were highlighting that in his role he had specific legal/regulatory obligations to the funds specifically. I don’t think that the intention was that the concept of fraud doesn’t exist outside that relationship, although @Cactus is right that the wording is a little funny.
I think the language reasonably flows from the start of the paragraph.
And the SEC sued, because this is pretty obviously fraud. But what kind of fraud?
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Rofl. Can’t wait to hear how this is actually an example of facing consequences.
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