Tag Archives: Edmund Polubinski III

SEC Debuts Roadmap for Resolving Illegal ICOs

by Joseph A. Hall, Michael Kaplan, Edmund Polubinski III, Byron B. Rooney, and Ryan Johansen 

In a pair of settled enforcement actions announced on November 16 in which it concluded that initial coin offerings conducted by Paragon Coin, Inc. (PDF: 232 KB) and AirFox (PDF: 223 KB) were illegal unregistered securities offerings, the SEC imposed an agreed-upon remedy that it will likely seek to use as the template for resolving its backlog of investigations into recent ICOs. Significantly, both ICOs took place after the SEC issued its July 2017 Section 21(a) report (PDF: 168 KB) addressing a crypto-token offering by The DAO, where the SEC warned the market (PDF: 169 KB) that some ICOs may violate the federal securities laws.

Neither Paragon nor AirFox agreed to conduct a “rescission offer” whereby the company would offer to repurchase the illegally offered tokens and any investor who declined the offer would retain freely tradable tokens (a remedy that Google undertook shortly after its IPO in order to resolve claims that certain pre-IPO compensatory equity grants were made in violation of the registration provisions of the Securities Act of 1933). Instead, each company agreed to distribute a “claim form” to all token purchasers offering return of the consideration paid, plus interest, in exchange for tender of the tokens, or offering damages to token purchasers who no longer hold their tokens. Purchasers of tokens located outside the United States are apparently not excluded from participation. Each company was also fined $250,000 and required to register its token as a security and become an SEC-reporting company for at least one year. Continue reading →

Securities Fraud Class Action Suits following Cyber Breaches: The Trickle Before the Wave

by Michael S. Flynn, Avi Gesser, Joseph A. Hall, Edmund Polubinski III, Neal A. Potischman, Brian S. Weinstein, Peter Starr and Jessica L. Turner

Overview

Large-scale data breaches can give rise to a host of legal problems for the breached entity, ranging from consumer class action litigation to congressional inquiries and state attorneys general investigations.  Increasingly, issuers are also facing the specter of federal securities fraud litigation.[1]

The existence of securities fraud litigation following a cyber breach is, to some extent, not surprising.  Lawyer-driven securities litigation often follows stock price declines, even declines that are ostensibly unrelated to any prior public disclosure by an issuer.  Until recently, significant declines in stock price following disclosures of cyber breaches were rare.  But that is changing.  The recent securities fraud class actions brought against Yahoo! and Equifax demonstrate this point; in both of those cases, significant stock price declines followed the disclosure of the breach.  Similar cases can be expected whenever stock price declines follow cyber breach disclosures.  Continue reading →