Stephen W. Tountas

On May 26, 2000, Broadcom’s Compensation and Options Committee granted more than seven million stock options to the company’s senior officers, the largest grant in Broadcom’s history, dated to the day the stock closed at its lowest point for the entire month of May. By July the share price had risen from $118 to a high of $261. Broadcom’s manager of financial reporting warned that the auditors could require the company to record compensation expense of over $700 million, and, as the shareholders later pleaded, Broadcom’s chief financial officer told the chief executive that Ernst & Young was asking for documentation of the grant that did not exist. On July 24, 2000 the audit team “eventually capitulated” to the chief financial officer, in the Ninth Circuit’s later words, “ultimately relying on a single conversation with him.”

Ernst & Young audited Broadcom from 1998 until the company fired it in 2008, and it gave the company one unqualified opinion after another. In January 2007 Broadcom restated its financial statements for fiscal years 1998 through 2005, acknowledging that it had improperly accounted for $2.2 billion in income; the shareholders alleged that between 2000 and 2006 the company had overstated net earnings and understated compensation expense by more than $2.2 billion through backdated options. Broadcom paid a $12 million civil penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and officers and directors faced civil and criminal charges. The New Mexico State Investment Council, lead plaintiff for purchasers of Broadcom Class A stock between July 21, 2005 and July 13, 2006, with the Bakers Local No. 433 Pension Fund, the Minnesota Bakers Union Pension Fund and the Twin Cities Bakery Drivers Pension Fund among the plaintiffs, filed a consolidated complaint in October 2008 that challenged the auditor’s unqualified opinion covering fiscal 2003 through 2005. Judge Manuel L. Real of the Central District of California dismissed the claims against Ernst & Young after a hearing in February 2009, remarking from the bench that there was “a little bit of a heavier burden of allegations on accountants on the question of scienter.”

Stephen W. Tountas, then at Labaton Sucharow in New York, was one of three lawyers on the public pension fund’s appeal, with Thomas A. Dubbs, who argued it, and Joseph A. Fonti. The panel heard argument in Pasadena on November 1, 2010, and on April 14, 2011 Judges Johnnie B. Rawlinson and Alfred T. Goodwin, with District Judge Jack Zouhary of the Northern District of Ohio sitting by designation and writing for the unanimous court, reversed. Tountas has been a partner at Kasowitz in New York since January 2016. He represents hedge funds, mutual funds, family offices and public pension funds in securities and commercial disputes, prosecuting and defending them, and his work since Broadcom has run through the Valeant opt-out litigation, the Essar Steel Minnesota litigation trust and the bondholders of a failed Arizona sports park.

A Horse Race Already Run

“Backdating of options is akin to betting on a horse race after the horse has already crossed the finish line,” Judge Zouhary wrote. The opinion explained that a company that backdates must record the in-the-money grants as compensation expense, and that Broadcom’s failure to do so was what overstated its net income. Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act the complaint had to state with particularity facts giving rise to a strong inference of scienter, meaning actual knowledge or deliberate recklessness, and under Tellabs that inference had to be at least as compelling as any innocent explanation. The panel first rejected the district court’s premise: the Ninth Circuit had “previously advised against developing separate[ ] rules of thumb for each type of scienter allegation,” and auditors answered to the same standard as anyone else. For an auditor the red flag doctrine guided the inquiry, so that the more facts alleged that should have led a reasonable auditor to investigate further, the more cogent and compelling the inference of scienter.

The court then took the complaint’s three principal allegations in turn and held that each, standing alone, supported an inference of scienter. The May 2000 grant came first: the failure to investigate a grant of that size “was not minor or technical in nature,” and “This Complaint alleges more than negligence.” Ernst & Young answered that different auditors had signed off in 2000 and issued the 2005 opinion; the court replied that the firm “cannot insulate itself from accountability for multiple years of approved financial statements.” The second allegation concerned 2001. Broadcom’s bylaws gave its two-member compensation committee alone the power to grant options to officers and required both members for a quorum; one member died in 2001, and no replacement was named until February 2002, when a resolution appointing the new member was backdated to October 2001. In the interval the committee allegedly approved grants on June 24, October 19 and December 24, 2001. Ernst & Young, the shareholders alleged, received unsigned draft minutes for the June grant and, in March 2002, a falsified unanimous written consent for the later ones, and the restatement put the compensation expense from those grants at $569 million. Accepting such documents as support for grants that could not have been validly made, the court held, sufficiently pleaded an audit “so deficient that the audit amounted to no audit at all.” The third allegation was that in June 2003 Broadcom’s board strengthened its option-granting procedures with Ernst & Young participating in or presiding over the reforms, yet the firm never revisited the earlier grants or pressed for a restatement, and the reforms became public only with the 2007 restatement; the court rejected the argument that the changes were ordinary Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Viewed as a whole, the complaint also alleged that Ernst & Young knew there was insufficient documentation for nearly half of the $2.2 billion in backdated grants, knew Broadcom’s internal controls were weak without expanding its audit procedures, and ignored other red flags while issuing clean opinions. “During this entire time, EY failed to change course,” Judge Zouhary wrote, and at “this early phase of the proceedings” the inference of scienter was at least as compelling as any innocent one. The panel reversed the dismissal and remanded, declining to reach loss causation because the district court had not decided it. The pleading had moved beyond general accounting and auditing standards to what the auditor saw, requested, lacked and nevertheless certified, and viewed individually and collectively under Tellabs those allegations let the auditor claim continue. Broadcom had already agreed, on December 29, 2009, to pay $160.5 million to settle the shareholders’ claims against the company and certain of its officers and directors; on September 28, 2012 Ernst & Young agreed to pay $13 million to resolve the revived claim. Tountas’s pleading and appellate work restored a significant claim for further litigation on behalf of the public pension fund and helped carry the matter to that negotiated resolution, about $173 million in all.

A Few Weeks Before Trial

Tountas took his law degree from Washington University School of Law in 2003, where he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law & Policy, after an undergraduate degree from Union College in 2000, and he is admitted in New York and New Jersey. He finished school in the years of Enron and WorldCom. “I wanted to work on financial fraud cases,” he said in 2020, citing the growth of the field and the need of the people harmed for strong representation. “Unfortunately, that era has repeated itself a few times over.” Before Kasowitz, at Labaton Sucharow, his matters included the Schering-Plough and Merck ENHANCE litigation, the Adelphia opt-outs, MF Global and Broadcom, and he litigated appeals in the Second, Third and Ninth Circuits. The matters used different routes: a securities class action, direct investor actions following a class exit, claims affected by an issuer’s insolvency and an auditor appeal. In them he identified available defendants and sources of recovery, preserved proof as forums changed, and carried pharmaceutical and accounting allegations through appellate and trial preparation.

In April 2006 Schering-Plough completed ENHANCE, a clinical trial comparing Vytorin, its combination of Zetia and simvastatin, with simvastatin alone, and found no statistically significant difference between them in reducing atherosclerosis. The company kept marketing both drugs for about two years without disclosing the result, announced in November 2007 that it would change the study’s primary endpoint, retreated under public criticism without releasing the data, and finally presented the full results on March 30, 2008 at the American College of Cardiology conference, where a panel of cardiologists advised that Vytorin and Zetia be used only after other treatments failed. The class covered purchasers of Schering common stock, its 6 percent mandatory convertible preferred stock and call options, and sellers of put options, from January 3, 2007 through March 28, 2008. Judge Dennis M. Cavanaugh of the District of New Jersey appointed the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, the Louisiana Municipal Police Employees’ Retirement System and the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board lead plaintiffs on April 17, 2008, with Labaton Sucharow and Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann as lead counsel. He denied the motion to dismiss in its entirety on September 2, 2009, certified the class on September 25, 2012, and the same day denied the defendants’ and underwriters’ motions for summary judgment; the Third Circuit declined to hear an interlocutory appeal of the certification. Trial was set for March 4, 2013.

The case settled for $473 million in cash, and the related Merck Vytorin/Zetia action for $215 million, “only a few weeks before trial was to begin,” after discovery that Judge Cavanaugh described as “a vast number of depositions, the review of millions of documents, mock trials, and extensive pre-trial-preparation.” More than 346,000 notice packets went to the Schering class, and one objection was filed. Tountas was Labaton Sucharow’s counsel of record for the lead plaintiffs in the Schering action when Judge Cavanaugh approved both settlements, $688 million together, on October 1, 2013. He has said of the case that had it not been pushed forward to the eve of trial it “would have settled for pennies on the dollar.” In MF Global, whose Chapter 11 filing left investors in more than $600 million of bonds sold in three offerings holding defaulted paper and was followed by the disclosure that more than $1.2 billion in customer funds was missing, he represented an institutional investor in the securities litigation before Judge Marrero of the Southern District of New York, in which Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Alberta and the Virginia Retirement System were co-lead plaintiffs and which produced settlements totaling more than $234 million: about $64.5 million from former officers and directors including Jon S. Corzine, about $65 million from PricewaterhouseCoopers, about $74 million from one group of underwriters, about $30 million from a second, and about $1 million from Commerz Markets. In Adelphia, ten large investors opted out of the class and pursued direct claims after the company’s bankruptcy, and the settlements involved officers, directors, an auditor, financial companies and other parties; Tountas’s team separated each investor’s transactions, losses, available claims and sources of recovery while maintaining claims against different actors through the insolvency.

Kasowitz announced on January 11, 2016 that he had joined the firm as a partner, after more than ten years on the plaintiffs’ side of securities cases. “We are very pleased that Steve has joined Kasowitz,” Marc Kasowitz, the firm’s managing partner, said that day. His current practice includes direct and class securities actions, opt-outs, commercial litigation, creditors’ claims, litigation trusts and strategic case development.

Philidor’s Only Client

Valeant Pharmaceuticals grew by acquisition rather than research under the chief executive who took over in February 2008, buying drugs that faced little competition and raising their prices; in 2015, the shareholders later alleged, it raised brand-name prices by 66 percent on average, about five times its closest peers, while expanding patient-assistance programs that waived co-pays and kept the increases from the attention of payors. Philidor Rx Services was formed on January 2, 2013. “Philidor’s only client was Valeant,” the complaint alleged; Valeant employees staffed it under assumed names, a January 2013 agreement gave Valeant the right to audit it, and in December 2014 a Valeant subsidiary paid $100 million for a ten-year option to acquire Philidor for nothing. Between September and October 2015 subpoenas, a short seller’s report and press reports exposed the relationship; Philidor closed and Valeant cut its ties; in February 2016 the company disclosed about $58 million of improperly recognized 2014 revenue and the SEC opened an investigation; and in March 2016 Valeant cut its guidance. On April 28, 2017 Judge Michael A. Shipp of the District of New Jersey sustained the class’s Exchange Act claims against Valeant and its officers for purchases of its equity and senior notes from January 4, 2013 to March 15, 2016, finding the inference of fraud at least as strong as the innocent one and counting the “incredibly rich compensation packages based on achieving increasingly challenging performance goals” that the complaint described as part of it.

Thirty-seven groups of investors in Valeant’s stock and debt opted out of the class and filed their own actions in the District of New Jersey, asserting claims under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Exchange Act and, in some of the suits, Section 18, the Securities Act, common-law fraud, negligent misrepresentation and the New Jersey Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, over purchases between January 3, 2013 and August 10, 2016. Among them, in August 2017, Kasowitz filed suit in federal court in New Jersey for Lord Abbett & Co., a mutual fund company that alleged it had bought Valeant’s debt securities at an artificially high price, pleading New Jersey’s racketeering statute, which allows treble damages. Tountas devised the strategy of pleading the New Jersey RICO Act for a public pension fund in its direct action against Valeant and defeated Valeant’s motion to dismiss, preserving that state-law route alongside the investor-specific securities theories pursued outside the class, and other plaintiffs’ firms later adopted the approach. On July 31, 2018 Judge Shipp held that Valeant, its executives and PricewaterhouseCoopers must face RICO claims in three of the investors’ suits. The class settled with Valeant on December 16, 2019 for $1.21 billion, and the court granted final approval on January 31, 2021; the opt-out actions went on.

For mutual funds, a public pension plan and other institutional investors with fraud-related losses in Valeant, Tountas pursued direct securities claims, and his team developed client-specific causes of action, transaction records, causation theories, damages analyses and dispositive-motion strategy around each investor’s holdings and decisions. The investor who opts out pleads its own purchases, the reliance theory that applies to them, causation, damages and timeliness under each claim it brings, and may keep state-law or statutory theories the class cannot bring. The team tied each claim to the client’s actual portfolio, preserved those separate legal routes, and prepared the direct cases for dispositive review and trial, which gave the investors a concrete basis for choosing a direct path, keeping control of case strategy, and comparing class participation with a separately negotiated resolution built around their own evidence and objectives. Tountas resolved several of the direct actions for pension funds by asserting New Jersey RICO claims; the others survived summary judgment and are being prepared for trial. A direct case creates leverage only when counsel is prepared to prove the investor’s particular loss and legal theory, and Tountas’s role has been to preserve that route when it offers a defensible advantage while recognizing that class participation may remain the more efficient course for a different investor.

The Only Opt-Out

Adeptus Health was once the largest operator of freestanding emergency rooms in the United States. Shareholders in the Eastern District of Texas alleged that between June 25, 2014 and March 1, 2017 the company overstated its profitability and concealed the strain on its liquidity: it routinely overbilled patients for minor treatment, so that insurers rejected its claims and the quality of its receivables fell; its controls over revenue collection failed; and it paid all of the pre-opening costs and losses of its joint ventures with hospital systems. The former chief executive and chief financial officer sold more than $50 million of their own shares at the inflated prices, including in the secondary offerings of July 29, 2015 and June 8, 2016, before the disclosure of a liquidity crisis erased hundreds of millions of dollars in market value and the company entered a multibillion-dollar bankruptcy. Judge Amos Mazzant appointed the Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Association and the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System lead plaintiffs on August 31, 2017, largely denied the motions to dismiss on September 12, 2018, and on May 20, 2020 approved a $44 million class settlement.

Tountas represented a hedge fund that held one of the three largest equity positions in Adeptus before the bankruptcy. “Our client was a hedge fund that would have gotten almost nothing out of the bankruptcy,” he said. “We filed the only opt-out, and demonstrated our trial threat from the outset,” to position the fund for a meaningful recovery. He led the direct action against Adeptus’s former officers, directors and private-equity sponsor, pursuing the fund’s fraud-related losses outside the class, and the claims settled on confidential terms.

A Half-Finished Pellet Plant

Essar Steel Minnesota, a subsidiary of Essar Global Fund Limited of India, spent about seven years building an iron ore mine and taconite pellet plant at Nashwauk, Minnesota, financed by debt and a large equity infusion from its parent. Essar put $1.8 billion into the project, and in late 2015, out of cash, it walked away from a plant that contractors judged about half complete and that would cost $600 million or more to finish. The company filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware in July 2016, and more than 300 creditors filed claims, among them ICICI Bank’s Singapore branch for $552.3 million, U.S. Bank National Association for $383.5 million and Bank of India for $150.4 million. Tountas led an investigation for the official committee of unsecured creditors; in January 2017 the former Essar Steel Minnesota sued Essar Global for $1 billion over the project, alleging that money meant for Minnesota had gone to Essar ventures elsewhere in the world, and the adversary proceeding that became the creditors’ case against the company’s former managers was filed the same month. In June 2017 Judge Brendan Linehan Shannon confirmed a plan under which Chippewa Capital Partners, a venture of Tom Clarke and GFG Alliance, took over the project and resumed construction; the judge called it “a very good, and, to be candid, somewhat unexpected result.” The plan created the UC Litigation Trust for the unsecured creditors, with Kevin Nystrom as trustee, and the trust took over the claims.

In its third amended complaint the trustee alleged that between 2008 and 2016 Essar Steel Minnesota paid Essar Global and its affiliates more than $1.1 billion, roughly what it was obligated to spend under its project contracts to finish the plant, and was left with the half-completed pellet plant. The transfers it described included $5 million sent in 2012 to Trinity Coal Corporation, an Essar Global subsidiary, for no consideration and for purposes unrelated to the project, which Madhu Vuppuluri, the company’s chief executive, authorized the same day he discussed it with Prashant Ruia rather than with his own board; a $79 million draw on an ICICI loan that the company, at Essar Global’s request, lent on to Essar Global; a 2013 email copied to Ruia that described the company’s finances as dire and its project at a “standstill”; a transfer to Aegis for no consideration; letters of credit opened in 2015 with the Minnesota company’s money for other Essar entities, funded the business day after Ruia replied to an affiliate’s request, copying Vuppuluri, “Pls revert on the solution ASAP”; payments for equipment the defendants never expected to receive; and invoices paid to Essar Projects-US for work never performed for the Minnesota company. The claims were for breach of the duties of loyalty and care against Vuppuluri and Sanjay Bhartia, the chief financial officer, as governors and officers, aiding and abetting against Ruia, who the complaint said was Essar Global’s “de facto CEO” and had “exercised domination and control” over the company’s significant transactions, and disallowance of the two officers’ own claims against the estate. Tountas led the Kasowitz team for the trustee with Andrew K. Glenn and Robert M. Novick.

Vuppuluri and Bhartia moved to dismiss, arguing that Delaware’s borrowing statute rather than Minnesota’s six-year limitations period should govern, that the company’s articles exculpated them, and that the duty-of-care allegations were too thin. On May 5, 2021 Judge Shannon denied the motions: because the trustee had sued in the forum with the shorter limitations period there was no forum shopping, the internal affairs doctrine applied and Minnesota’s six years governed; the allegations of bad faith and intentional misconduct were ones no exculpation clause could reach; and the complaint’s accounts of warnings ignored, funds transferred without documentation or board approval, and transactions no one could reasonably have believed served the company had carried the claims “across the line from conceivable to plausible.” Both officers, the court found, plausibly lacked independence because their livelihoods depended on Essar Global, its affiliates and the Ruia family. Ruia, a resident of India, then argued that the trust had no authority to sue him because he had not been a governor during the relevant period, that his contacts with the United States were too slight for personal jurisdiction, and that the complaint did not show he knew of the company’s distress. On September 27, 2021 Judge Craig T. Goldblatt denied his motion on every ground: the plan’s definition of individual claims reached anyone who “was or is” a director; under Bankruptcy Rule 7004(f) the question was contacts with the United States as a whole, and “even a single telephone call into the forum state can support jurisdiction”; and the complaint supported the inference that Ruia “directed or urged Vuppuluri to make the transfers,” with the 2013 email showing what he knew two years before the letters of credit were funded.

After five years of litigation Tountas settled the trustee’s claims against the two former officers and the controlling shareholder for $26.5 million, including a $5.5 million out-of-pocket cash payment from an individual defendant who had no insurance. Tracing the money was one part of the work; counsel also had to account for who owned each claim, its priority, the available defendants, insurance, collectability, and the authority of the committee and then the trust at each stage of the restructuring, because the claim could produce value only if it stayed with the entity authorized to pursue it. When an issuer enters Chapter 11 after a fraud-related loss, the forum, the priority, the set of defendants, the ownership of the claim and the estate’s own causes of action can all change, and Tountas’s creditor work begins by determining whether a claim belongs to an individual investor, the bankruptcy estate or a litigation trust, which forum may hear it, and what priorities and releases apply before estate claims pass into a committee- or trust-held, court-approved form. For a group of hedge funds he secured a confidential settlement with the officers and directors of SunEdison after its multibillion-dollar bankruptcy and alleged accounting scandal, and he negotiated a resolution without any payment for a multibillion-dollar hedge fund that a litigation trustee had threatened to sue. In the direct securities cases and the restructuring cases alike the first question is who owns the claim, and the answer determines the forum, the causes of action, the proof to preserve and the party with authority to approve a resolution.

Both Sides of the Caption

Tountas also defends securities cases, and has represented public companies and officers as well as investors. He settled a securities class action for a former chief financial officer before the motions to dismiss were decided; won dismissal with prejudice for a public company and its senior officers and argued the appeal in the Second Circuit; resolved Justice Department matters and Delaware books-and-records demands for a Fortune 500 company without litigation or payment; represented a former public-company officer in an SEC investigation and the related internal investigation; and in 2017 was defending a putative securities class action against Eros International while bringing a direct action for stakeholders against SunEdison’s officers and directors. That experience on both sides informs his analysis of pleading vulnerabilities, discovery cost, expert disputes, settlement pressure, jurisdiction, causation and damages, and of the ways a defendant may attack scienter, loss causation, class treatment, jurisdiction or damages, before an investor commits to a separate direct action; for investor and creditor clients, anticipating those attacks focuses the complaint, preserves the necessary record and identifies the point at which a class, a direct action, an appeal, a committee investigation or a trust-owned claim offers the strongest available route.

Before a client files, he and the client decide whether to pursue the claim directly or remain within a class, and the answer turns on the client’s transactions, the available causes of action, the proof, the client’s objectives, limitations periods, expected recovery, cost, and its willingness to conduct separate discovery and accept trial risk. A class aggregates common claims and reduces an investor’s individual burden, but the investor ordinarily cedes day-to-day control to court-appointed representatives and counsel; a direct action can preserve distinct claims or damages theories, yet it requires a pleading and evidentiary record built for one investor. Tountas evaluates those tradeoffs before the client selects its litigation path. He oversees the firm’s contingency and alternative-fee matters and leads its outreach to litigation funders, and on June 4, 2019 he spoke on the “State of the Market” panel at IMN’s litigation finance conference in New York. He is a long-term member of the Securities Litigation Committee of the New York City Bar Association, where he joined a panel on “Hot Topics in Federal Securities Litigation” on January 14, 2019, and he sits on the Securities Editorial Advisory Board of Law360. He serves as strategic advisor and lead counsel to one of the world’s largest credit funds in class actions over the alleged manipulation of complex financial instruments, and for several public companies he investigated and pursued claims against market participants alleged to have run a multiyear short-and-distort scheme to drive down their share prices.

Forged Letters of Intent

Legacy Cares, Inc., a nonprofit, raised more than $280 million in two municipal bond offerings through the Arizona Industrial Development Authority, $250 million in August 2020 and a supplemental issue in June 2021, mostly tax-exempt and unrated, to build Legacy Park, a 320-acre youth and amateur sports complex in Mesa, Arizona, for soccer, basketball, volleyball and pickleball. The park opened in January 2022 and within months could not make its monthly bond payments; it was in default by October 2022, and on May 1, 2023 Legacy Cares filed for Chapter 11 in Arizona, reporting $366 million in liabilities against $242 million in assets, $229 million of that the book value of the complex. In June the United States trustee asked the court to appoint an independent trustee or dismiss the case for gross mismanagement. Judge Daniel Collins declined, writing that “any party engaged in wrongdoings before or after the petition date will be held to account,” and in August he said the court “smells smoke” and expected the bondholders to pursue their remedies. A September 2023 bidding round drew no qualified bids. In October 2023 the court approved a sale to AZ Athletic Associates for $25.7 million in cash, $19.14 million of it to contractors holding mechanics’ liens; the bondholders, owed about $284 million, received $2.4 million in cash and an 11 percent equity stake in the buyer.

On April 1, 2025 the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged Randy Miller, 70, the former chairman and president of Legacy Sports, and his son Chad Miller, 41, its former chief executive, with conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, and the SEC sued both men and Jeffrey De Laveaga, the park’s former chief operating officer, in Manhattan federal court. From November 2019 to May 2023, the government charged, the Millers forged and altered “binding” letters of intent and contracts to show that sports clubs and leagues had committed to fill the park with events and fees far beyond anything those organizations were considering, signing customers’ names or copying their signatures onto fabricated documents, among them documents of an organization that promotes sports for disabled athletes; told investors the park would be 100 percent occupied at opening and would take in nearly $100 million in its first year, enough to cover the bond payments; and then spent bond proceeds on a home and SUVs and paid themselves inflated salaries. On May 28, 2025 both pleaded guilty to securities offering fraud and aggravated identity theft, and on September 9, 2025 Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sentenced Randy Miller to six years in prison and Chad Miller to five. “Randy and Chad Miller orchestrated a sophisticated scheme that cost bondholders nearly $300 million,” said Jay Clayton, the United States Attorney. Antonia Apps of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement said, “The SEC will hold accountable individuals who defraud municipal bond investors.”

Tountas represents an ad hoc group of the bondholders, several of the world’s largest asset managers, and is leading the prosecution of their claims against the underwriter, bond counsel and other third parties to recover the hundreds of millions of dollars the sale left unpaid. In 2020 he predicted that as strategies for recovering fraud-related losses proved themselves, “there will be a lot more scrutiny on how investment funds fulfill their fiduciary obligations,” and that more hedge funds and mutual funds would choose direct actions over a place in the class.