REPRESENTING WHISTLEBLOWERS

Whistleblowers play a vital role in the protecting and promoting the integrity of our capital markets and of our economy. We represent whistleblowers before a variety of regulators, most frequently the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Our job is to work with people who have information demonstrating that a company selling its stocks and bonds to U.S. investors has misled the public in connection with those sales. 

We work closely with our whistleblower clients to develop and analyze the information so that the regulator can easily understand the importance of the information our clients are bringing to them. Once we have prepared and made the whistleblower submission, we then interface with the regulator to provide additional information and answer their questions. If our submission and follow-on work spurs the regulator to bring an enforcement action, and that action results in a substantial monetary recovery for the regulator, then our clients are typically entitled to a portion of that recovery as a “whistleblower award.” We advocate for our clients to receive as high an award as possible given the value of the information they provided.

At every step of the way, we take every available precaution to ensure that the identity of our whistleblower clients is protected and remains confidential. These precautions include—from the very beginning of our engagement—secure and encrypted communications. Protecting the confidentiality of our clients is critical, both on an individual level and more broadly. For the individual, confidentiality allows our clients to tell the truth without fear of retaliation from their employers. It also allows them to avoid being targeted by other players within the industry and being wrongly or unfairly portrayed in the media.

Some of our whistleblower engagements are traditional, where we represent corporate insiders who learn of unlawful conduct within their company and raise concerns internally, but are ignored, rebuffed or even retaliated against for having shone a light on the misconduct. Here, we work with our clients and with regulators—and at times, federal law enforcement—to develop the information needed to bring those wrongdoers to justice, holding them accountable for having misled U.S. investors.

Other times, we break new ground in the whistleblower world. We have represented senior executives of national and international non-profit advocacy organizations in filing whistleblower actions on the basis of our clients’ independent analysis of corporate wrongdoing.

Our targets have included the infrastructure bank of Japan, which raised approximately a half-billion dollars by selling bonds to U.S. investors with the promise that none of the funds would be used for the construction of coal-fired power plants. We developed information that the money was in truth put into a commingled pool that was then intended to be used to fund coal-fired power plants in Bangladesh and Indonesia, and that U.S. bond investors had been misled. Immediately after our filing, Japan’s foreign minister was confronted by the media about our allegations, and within just a few months, the infrastructure bank announced that it would halt planned construction.

Another example of this pioneering work is the SEC whistleblower claim we filed on behalf of senior executives of an international non-profit called “Mighty Earth” against the world’s largest meat processor, JBS. JBS and its subsidiaries sold to U.S. investors over $3 billion in so-called sustainability-linked bonds. The bonds were promoted on the premise that the company—long one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases—would be “Net Zero by 2040.” The company played up its efforts, such as buying electric trucks and installing solar panels on its plants, but it turns out its public claims were just window dressing masking the truth: its greenhouse gas emissions are only growing larger every year, even exceeding the total emissions of several mid-sized industrialized countries.

We have found this form of advocacy—a dual-track legal and media strategy—can be highly effective in holding accountable high-intensity carbon polluters who engage in misleading “greenwashing.” A few examples of our advocacy in this arena are described here, here and here.

If you know of corporate malfeasance that erodes the integrity of U.S. capital markets, please contact an attorney at The Galbraith Law Firm for a free, confidential consultation. We will work with you to evaluate your case, to preserve your evidence, to ensure your confidentiality and to safeguard your legal rights.