Fortunately, I found this Bloomberg piece by Matt Levine on the sheer nuttiness of the prosecution’s case against Martoma, Boca Raton Mallu kuttan-turned Gordan Gekko wannabe-turned-Zio-fall-guy.
Mr. Levine’s eminently sensible piece makes me entertain the possibility that not all New York Jewish journalists are shameless, ethnocentric, goy-hating race supremacist water-carriers for their tribe’s financial criminals.
Oh, I forgot. There’s the admirable Matthew Goldstein too, who did pursue the SAC case from the start.
“The argument is that Martoma, a crafty computer villain who once changed the clock on his computer to send an e-mail, knew how to erase all traces of a different e-mail both from his own computer and also from the sender’s computer and from all servers and networks everywhere so that the FBI can’t find it no matter how hard they look. We know he can fool the FBI’s best and brightest because he once changed the clock on his dorm-room PC. You could only make this argument if you have no idea how computers work, or if, more likely, you’re relying on a judge who has no idea how computers work. Nuts.
The thing is, there are crooks in the financial industry. And, look, reading this evidence, I am persuaded that Mathew Martoma might be one of them. But it’s not a good look for our justice system to rely on a general sense of financial-industry crookedness to get convictions for actual instances of actual crimes. That sort of happens, though, with prosecutors and the SEC arguing that the individual defendant in front of them did whatever he did out of “Wall Street greed.”5 “Wall Street greed” strikes me as code for: “Don’t worry about the facts of this case. Don’t you feel in your heart that everyone who works in finance is probably a crook? Isn’t that enough to convict?”
The Harvard stuff is a little different, in that it gets at not a general sense of financial-industry crookedness, but a specific sense of Martoma’s own (alleged, past, relatively harmless) crookedness. But it’s still an effort by prosecutors to get an insider trading conviction, not by proving that Martoma got inside information — in fact, they’re admitting that they can’t prove it!6 — but by creating a general sense that he’s probably a crook so you might as well send him to jail. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”
What Levine misses is that even the alleged forging of the computer email is not a proven fact at all
It’s just Harvard’s say so.
[Correction: Apparently, Harvard’s server had a copy of the email dated earlier, so there is, allegedly, a basis for the claim of “some of the board members” (of Harvard) that Martoma backdated the computer email to make it look like he withdrew his clerkship applications before being found out.]
There’s no evidence that Martoma’s version of that story isn’t the right one too.
The concocted computer firm endorsement doesn’t necessarily mean he was lying about the email.
On the contrary……