Judge Rakoff officiates at ex-law clerk’s nuptials
Order in the wedding party — here come da judge.
Order in the wedding party — here come da judge.
The words “U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff” can strike terror in the hearts of Wall Street titans, corporate chieftains and regulators alike. But the judge — who recently rejected the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed $33 million settlement with Bank of America Corp. over failure to disclose the megabonuses at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., calling it “neither fair nor reasonable nor adequate” — can be a softie.
The judge presided over the Oct. 3 wedding of one of his former law clerks, Benjamin Naftalis, to Meredith Gordon, an American Express Co. manager, in Newport, R.I. With a nod to his place in recent headlines, he introduced a light-hearted story about the couple by saying, “In the interest of what the SEC would call full transparency, I would tell a story about how Ben and Meredith fell in love,” according to a Wall Street Journal blog.
The father of the groom, however, drew the heartiest laughs. Toasting the judge for officiating over the affair, prominent trial attorney Gary Naftalis said the jurist “is not one who lightly approves or signs off on consensual agreements,” the blog reported.
The elder Mr. Naftalis should know.
He represented Bernard Ebbers, the former chairman of WorldCom Inc., in a class action securities fraud case. The judge, for his part, oversaw the SEC’s 2003 settlement with WorldCom over accounting fraud — a case in which he insisted on corporate-governance changes at the telecommunications company’s successor firm.
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