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On September 14, 2023, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced the Strengthening Antitrust Enforcement for Meatpacking Act of 2023, an ambitious new piece of legislation designed to halt consolidation in the meatpacking industry.
Cryptocurrency had a rocky 2022. Bitcoin, often touted as a hedge against inflation, lost nearly 65 percent of its value. FTX, one of the most popular and well-known platforms for trading crypto, declared bankruptcy.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) will soon have the tools necessary to enforce its longstanding rules regarding share repurchases.
Recent technological advances, including cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (“AI”), have made their stamp on the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and its goals.
On March 15, 2023, the Securities Exchange Commission (“SEC”) issued three additional proposed rules that would expand the reach of the agency’s current cybersecurity guidance to new entities and augment existing cybersecurity compliance obligations.
Over the last several weeks, federal regulators and prosecutors have sent a strong signal to company executives that they will be using every tool in their arsenal to combat insider trading.
V&E SEC Update
On February 22, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) issued a cease-and-desist order (the “Order”) charging African Gold Acquisition Corp. (“African Gold”) with multiple violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”) related to African Gold’s failure to maintain a sufficient system of internal controls.1
On February 7, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Examination (the “Division”) announced its 2023 examination priorities to “provide insights into its risk-based approach, including the areas it believes present potential risks to investors and the integrity of the U.S. capital markets.”
On January 13, 2023, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in two consolidated cases from the Seventh Circuit to consider whether a defendant relying on an objectively reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous law acts “knowingly” in violation of the False Claims Act (“FCA”).
On February 3, 2023, the SEC announced that Activision Blizzard Inc. — the publicly traded video game developer and publisher of such well-known videogames as “Candy Crush” and “World of Warcraft” — “agreed to pay $35 million to settle charges that it failed to maintain disclosure controls and procedures to ensure that the company could assess whether its disclosures pertaining to its workforce were adequate” and “violated an SEC whistleblower protection rule” by impeding employees “from communicating directly with the Commission staff about a possible securities law violation.”
V&E SEC Update