Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel partner Barry Berke told a federal court jury Monday that his client Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang did not break the law in the year preceding the collapse of his $36 billion fund Archegos Capital Management in 2021.

Patrick Halligan.  Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

“You’ll see that so much of what the prosecution points to as being … evidence of something improper was in fact a product of that horrible, horrible pandemic that we all experienced,” Berke said in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.