Doug Berman points out that Thursday was a busy day in New Orleans as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued over 160 published and unpublished decisions that appear mostly to involve rejection of various Booker sentencing claims. It’s safe to say that the release of that many decisions sets a federal appellate record for the number of opinions issued by a court on one day.
Lost amidst all that activity, however, is the fact that the Fifth Circuit still has not ruled on the appeal in the sad case of Jamie Olis, even though oral argument in that appeal occurred on January 30 of this year. And while that appeal has been pending, Mr. Olis has been moved — due to the absurd length of his 24 year sentence — from a minimum-security prison in Bastrop, Texas to a medium-security prison at Oakdale, La., where prison gangs are common and many prisoners are serving multiple life sentences.
The Fifth Circuit’s reputation in business cases took a serious hit with its Arthur Andersen decision, which was resoundingly rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court earlier this year. The Fifth Circuit has an opportunity to begin redeeming its reputation in business cases in the Olis appeal, but justice delayed is often justice denied. Here’s hoping that a decision in the Olis appeal is forthcoming any day now.

Following on this post from last week regarding a plea deal of a former banker who had promoted KPMG’s tax shelters, this Wall Street Journal ($) article provides more information on the involvement of several banks — namely UBS AG, Deutsche Bank AG and HVB Group — in providing billions of dollars in credit lines to KPMG clients — and, in turn, earning substantial bank fees — in connection with KPMG’s promotions of tax shelters to its clients.
According to the WSJ article, Deutsche Bank, which happens to be a KPMG audit client, earned almost $80 million in bank fees from the Opis and Blips transactions that are at the heart of the questionable tax shelter vehicles. HVB, which is also a KPMG audit client, earned 5.5 million on Blips transactions in just three months during 1999 and millions more in 2000. UBS participated in 100 to 150 transactions in 1997-1998, but the amount of UBS’ fees are unclear.
Interestingly, the article points out that Deutsche Bank lawyers cautioned the company’s bankers that Blips transactions posed substantial risks for the bank’s reputation. Nevertheless, the CEO of Deutsche Bank’s U.S. unit at the time approved the bank’s participation in the transactions so long as “any customer found to be in litigation be excluded from the product . . . and that a low profile be kept on these transactions.”
I think it’s safe to say that the low profile has been blown.

This post from awhile back noted one of the by-products of the current trend toward criminalizing merely questionable business transactions — i.e., the government’s destruction of good reputations in its quest to obtain convictions against unpopular defendants.
Along those lines, this U.S.A. Today article from yesterday catches up with Mark Belnick, the former Paul Weiss partner and Tyco general counsel who was indicted and acquitted in connection with the prosecutions of former Tyco executives after he had coordinated the company’s cooperation with the criminal investigation of former Tyco executives Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz. Here is a longer New York Magazine article on Mr. Belnick’s ordeal.
In the article, Mr. Belnick discusses with the reporter the misery that he endured during a prosecution that was based upon grand larceny charges for compensation that was Tyco’s CEO and CFO indisputably approved:

“When I was threatened with grand larceny, I thought, ‘What did I steal — my stock bonus?’ ” says Belnick. “I didn’t even understand what the theory of grand larceny could be here.”

During the trial, the prosecution described Belnick as a “man who lost his moral compass” and accepted excessive compensation that he knew was a payoff for his silence about wrongdoing committed by Messrs. Kozlowski and Swartz. This, of course, after the same prosecutor had received Mr. Belnick’s assistance in uncovering the alleged wrongdoing by Messrs. Kozlowski and Swartz.
So it goes in the continuing criminalization of agency costs.