“I am friends with and helped promote two of the guys who signed the Complaint against Mark. Someone should tell Mark to look at my profile on my firm website, my SEC press releases, and advise Mark to add me to his defense team.”
Those are the words of former SEC Fort Worth enforcement chief Spencer Barasch, in a 2008 email pitching his services to a person close to Mark Cuban, the billionaire Texas businessman then facing an SEC insider trading complaint, the Dallas Morning News reports.
Now, the revolving door between the Securities and Exchange Commission and private law firms is known to spin pretty regularly. But it’s rare that we get evidence in email form of how former SEC officials trade on their relationships with current SECers.
As TPMmuckraker reported last week, Barasch is the former SEC enforcement attorney who quashed several probes of alleged Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford before going on to private practice and doing legal work for Stanford. (Of his most recent attempt to represent Stanford, Barasch told the SEC Inspector General: “Every lawyer in Texas and beyond is going to get rich over this case. Okay? And I hated being on the sidelines.”)
After the news of the complaint against Cuban broke in November 2008, Barasch, a partner at the international law firm Andrews Kurth, emailed a person “he thought could persuade Cuban to hire him,” according to the News. He slammed the attorney who Cuban had hired as having “no name appeal or clout with the SEC” before bragging of his relationships with the “the guys who signed the Complaint against Mark.”
Cuban never hired Barasch.
A spokeswoman for Andrews Kurth declined to comment on the email described by the News.
