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Friday, 7 April 2017

Business Dramas: Wall Street stool pigeons and Samsung’s quest for redemption

The best business drama we’ve read in a long time is Bloomberg’s recent take on the story of Guy Gentile, which it dubs “the Wall Street informant who double-crossed the FBI.” Gentile’s story isn’t as rare as you think: “He became one of the FBI’s 15,000 informants, or ‘confidential human sources,’ as the bureau calls them. The FBI has been using this tactic against stockbrokers and fund managers since at least 1992, when it created its first squad dedicated to Wall Street crime after the case against junk-bond king Michael Milken brought securities fraud into the mainstream. Informants are crucial to these cases, because tape recordings demonstrating wrongdoing cut through the complexity of stock market schemes for juries. And unlike agents, informants don’t require warrants to elicit evidence. Turncoats have driven some of the FBI’s biggest Wall Street investigations, like the landmark insider-trading cases against Raj Rajaratnam and Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors. Read “Bro, I’m going Rogue.”

The second-best business drama we’ve read in a while comes courtesy The Verge, which goes deep with “After the smoke clears: Inside Samsung’s quest for redemption.” It’s a deep dive into how the device maker worked to get past the self-immolating Note 7 debacle.

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