“Stop emailing me!”
That’s the message Judge Richard J. Sullivan wants to send to critics of the $1.8 billion deal Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors cut with the feds to settle insider-trading charges.
Sullivan approved the $900 million civil money-laundering slice of the settlement on Wednesday during a 45-minute conference with a gaggle of lawyers for SAC and prosecutors in Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara’s office.
Sullivan noted that he had received an email Tuesday from someone lambasting the agreement as a “sweetheart deal” for Cohen’s hedge fund that would create a “loss of trust in our system.”
The judge, while acknowledging the SAC matter is a “high-profile case people will be watching,” politely asked that others not email him. The proper place for such opinions, he said, is a letter to the editor or an op-ed piece in a newspaper.
Sullivan said he had little authority to tinker with the financial terms of the deal.
“Whether I think $900 million is a sufficient number is irrelevant,” he said.
A hearing on the second prong of the record-setting settlement — the criminal charges — is scheduled for Friday. Because it’s criminal, not civil, that plea will be held to a “different standard,” he said.
The government’s civil suit, filed in July, initially sought “any and all” assets of SAC Capital because “hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profits” had been commingled with other fund assets in a money-laundering scheme.
The government settled for a fraction of SAC’s $9 billion.
Third parties who believe they’ve been harmed by SAC’s actions — such as shareholders of companies whose shares were traded by SAC based on insider-information — can petition the Department of Justice for compensation after the deal is approved.