In late March, when James Kidney retired as a trial lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission after 24 years, he gave a retirement speech to remember. The 66-year-old lawyer accused the agency of padding its enforcement statistics by targeting small time violators, while it politely tiptoes around executive suites. Rarely have such criticisms been stated so bluntly and publicly by an agency insider.
Although Kidney didn’t mention a particular case, one example he could have cited was the SEC’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs & Co. over its Abacus investment vehicle. More than 2,000 pages of documents released by the SEC in response to an American Lawyer Freedom of Information Act request show Kidney’s frustrations over the SEC’s handling of that case, and the divisions within the agency over the investigation. (For a full timeline of the SEC’s deliberations, click here.)
