Donald Burwell, a former El Paso Corp. energy trader, pled guilty under a cooperation agreement with the Justice Department to federal charges Tuesday that he falsely reported natural gas trading data to a natural gas industry publication. Burwell faces a possible five-year prison sentence and a fine of $500,000, and his plea deal comes just two weeks after another of the dozen or so traders ensnared in the Justice Department’s prosecutions of natural gas traders filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea. Earlier posts on Burwell’s case are here and here. The DOJ’s press release on the plea deal is here.
Given that he is unemployed and broke financially, Burwell’s plea deal is not surprising. The Justice Department has been alleging some astronomical market effect figures in these cases in order to threaten defendants with draconian prison sentences and, as we have seen in the sad case of Jamie Olis, the DOJ will follow through on the threat regardless of the law or the facts. At least one of the other trader cases similar to Burwell’s is scheduled for trial later this year.