Lawyers with experience in securities investigations and white-collar criminal law say important lessons can be found in the experience of P. Mauricio Alvarado, who resigned as general counsel of the Stanford Financial Group the day before its companies and three top executives were accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running an $8 billion Ponzi scheme.
The lesson for any general counsel whose client is in trouble, said Roscoe C. Howard Jr., a partner in the Washington office of Troutman Sanders and a former federal prosecutor, is that resigning “might be a mitigating circumstance, but it’s not something that would completely absolve you of responsibility.”
