A unanimous federal appeals panel in Manhattan yesterday overturned an order requiring the defendants in the sprawling Galleon securities fraud case to turn over to the Securities and Exchange Commission approximately 18,000 wiretapped conversations they had been given by prosecutors in a parallel criminal prosecution.
Judge Gerard E. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, writing for the panel, concluded that Southern District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who is handling the SEC’s civil disgorgement proceeding against Galleon Group, had “clearly exceeded” his jurisdiction “by ordering the disclosure of thousands of conversations involving hundreds of parties, prior to any ruling on the legality of the wiretaps and without limiting the disclosure to relevant conversations.”
