Inside the End of the U.S. Bid to Punish Lehman Executives

At a closed-door meeting in early 2011, Wall Street regulators were close to throwing in the towel on their biggest case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s eight-member Lehman Brothers team, having hit one dead end after another over the previous two years, concluded that suing the bank’s executives would be legally unjustified. The group, noting that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents had already walked away from a parallel criminal case, reached unanimous agreement to close its most prominent investigation stemming from the financial crisis, according to officials who attended the meeting, which has not been reported previously.

But Mary L. Schapiro, the S.E.C. chairwoman, disagreed. She pushed George S. Canellos, who supervised the Lehman investigation as head of the S.E.C.’s New York office, to explain how executives who presided over the biggest bankruptcy in United States history could…

Barofsky, watchdog to government bank bailout program, joins law firm represents clients bringing suits against large financial institutions

Neil Barofsky, the former prosecutor who brought transparency and accountability to the federal government’s 2008 bank bailout program as its first special inspector general, has joined Jenner & Block, a law firm based in Chicago, as a partner.

Mr. Barofsky, who was appointed by President Obama to oversee the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in late 2008, was a Washington outsider whose periodic reports on the program questioned Treasury officials’ claims of its effectiveness. He and his office drew criticism at times from those officials, as a result.

Mr. Barofsky left his post in 2011 to teach at New York University’s law school. He also wrote “Bailout,” a scathing account of his time in Washington that highlighted the problem of regulators who he said were for the most part captured by…

REQUEST FOR RESEARCH ASSISTANCE: PROJECT UNENDORSED NOTES

September 5, 2013