Partner Rohan Virginkar was quoted in a Yahoo Finance article, “Under Armour’s SEC Resolution Shines Light on Financial Disclosures,” about Under Armour’s $9 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over a reporting practice known as “pull forward” reporting, which has no bearing on a separate inquiry into the sportswear brand by the Justice Department.
Virginkar, a former trial attorney in the DOJ’s fraud section, said it’s not unusual for the Department of Justice to conduct inquiries into the same kind of securities issues first pursued by the SEC. The DOJ tends to view financial inquiries through the lens of its own enforcement mechanisms and statutory provisions, such as wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy statutes, he said.
“There are real incentives to corporations under the sentencing guidelines and other DOJ policies that can often result in a pretty significant reduction in your criminal fine or penalty,” Virginkar said. “And so, companies have that incentive to cooperate, which then also means that you’re already engaged with the enforcement authority, as they start to think about resolving the case, and so, if there is a resolution of this case, my guess would be, it would not be thorough an indictment, but something short of indictment, whether that would be a guilty plea or whether that’s a deferred prosecution, non-prosecution or something else.”