White-Collar and Securities Litigators, Meet Your New SEC Enforcement Chief

White-Collar and Securities Litigators, Meet Your New SEC Enforcement Chief - 2/24/2009

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White-Collar and Securities Litigators, Meet Your New SEC Enforcement Chief
David Bario

American Lawyer. February 24, 2009
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EXCERPT: As a federal prosecutor in New York's Southern District, Robert Khuzami helped unravel the schemes of "blind sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman, now serving a life sentence for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing. But will he be able to build civil cases against the bankers behind all those complicated collateralized debt obligations? By all accounts, the new enforcement chief at the Securities and Exchange Commission is no wallflower--which is a good thing for a unit as battered and bruised as the one he now heads. He comes to the job from a stint as general counsel for the Americas for Deutche Bank AG, but before that he spent 11 years as a prosecutor in Manhattan. For three of those years, Khuzami was chief of the Southern District's securities and commodities fraud task force, where, according to former colleagues, he was an aggressive enforcer. "The job's going to be second nature for him," said Richard Zabel of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a Southern District alum who worked with Khuzami on the blind sheik case. Zabel told us that it's unusual to have a former criminal prosecutor heading enforcement at the SEC, and said he expects Khuzami's background to be a critical attribute in his new job. "You don't wind up as chief of securities fraud [in the Southern District] unless you're confident enough to be aggressive," Zabel said. Khuzami's experience as a prosecutor may also lead to changes in the SEC's frustrating modus operandi--often keeping incommunicado for months or years as cases are developed, letting cases drag on as every last possible witness is deposed, and delaying plea negotiations (and even contact) with defense lawyers. Khuzami's reputation suggests that he may marshal his agency's resources more wisely.

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