By SABEW Staff

PHOENIX, Feb. 3, 2010 — Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement chief Robert Khuzami has agreed to speak to the SABEW 47th Annual Conference in Phoenix, society President Greg McCune announced today.
Khuzami’s spot on the program for the March 19-21 conference, at the $71 million Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is still being finalized.

For 11 years just before his February 2009 appointment as SEC enforcement division director, Khuzami, 53, served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

There he served as chief of that office’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force for three years. According to an SEC statement issued at the time of his appointment, Khuzami “prosecuted numerous complex securities and white-collar criminal matters, including those involving insider trading, Ponzi schemes, accounting and financial statement fraud, organized crime infiltration of the securities markets, and IPO and investment adviser fraud.”
According to the SEC, during Khuzami’s time with the Task Force, it brought numerous noteworthy securities fraud prosecutions.

“In U.S. v. Lino and related cases, more than 100 defendants were arrested in an undercover sting operation, which constituted the largest simultaneous arrest in a securities fraud case in Department of Justice history,” the statement said. “Charges in the cases included racketeering, securities fraud, a scheme to defraud union pension plans, extortion, and the solicitation of murder. The case concerned the publicly traded securities of 19 companies and the private placements of 16 other companies. Those charged included 11 members and associates of all five New York City crime families.

“In another case, U.S. v. Bennett, 11 defendants were convicted of running a Ponzi scheme for fraudulently selling more than $1.0 billion worth of equipment leases and related debt instruments to more than 12,000 investors. Defendant Patrick Bennett was sentenced to 30 years in prison.”

Khuzami also prosecuted the “Blind Sheik” Omar Ahmed Ali Abdel Rahman in what was then the largest terrorism trial in U.S. history, dealing with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and other terrorist attacks. Khuzami also supervised various aspects of the initial investigations in New York following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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