The Securities and Exchange Commission has signaled that it was now taking a harder line on securities settlements, as it extracted its first admission of wrongdoing under a new policy, DealBook’s Alexandra Stevenson reports. The S.E.C. said on Monday that the hedge fund manager Philip A. Falcone had agreed to admit wrongdoing and to be barred from the securities industry for at least five years to settle accusations of market manipulation. He and his fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, must also pay more than $18 million. The deal comes after the S.E.C. had, in a rare move, overruled its own enforcement staff to reject a previous settlement with the hedge fund manager. The original agreement, which had called for a two-year ban from raising new capital and no admission of wrongdoing, “had irritated the S.E.C.’s new chairwoman, Mary Jo White, people briefed on the matter said, and frustrated many others within the agency who saw that deal as too lax,” Ms. Stevenson reports. More in the New York Times here.
