Lawyer Raided Sullivan & Cromwell Offices for Inside Info Years Ago, Court Filings Say
Years ago, when he worked at Sullivan & Cromwell’s offices on Wall Street as a corporate associate during the 1990s, Gil Cornblum regularly conducted what he called “spelunking” raids there around 4 a.m., reports the Globe and Mail.
Court documents filed in an Ontario insider-trading case against Cornblum and another lawyer state that he sought confidential information about pending corporate deals from press releases and contracts he found sitting on desks and copy machines; used temporary passwords to search electronically; and also simply asked Sullivan & Cromwell attorneys about the matters they were working on, the Canadian newspaper recounts.
The filing in the Ontario Court of Justice also says at least one law firm in Canada was mined for confidential corporate material.
Meanwhile, a filing (PDF) late yesterday by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a related federal case in New York says that Cornblum, while working as an associate at S&C and while working as a partner at Dorsey & Whitney, discussed material nonpublic information about some 40 pending deals to a law school classmate, reports the New York Law Journal.
Cornblum shared information about “15 pending transactions on which Sullivan was working” while employed as an associate there between March 1996 and June 1998, the SEC filing states, plus more than 20 additional pending deals that he learned about while he was a Dorsey partner from April 2005 to May 2008.
His former Osgoode Hall School of Law classmate and onetime roommate, self-employed business consultant Stanko Grmovsek, 40, pleaded guilty this week in both the Ontario insider-trading case and the New York federal court case. Grmovsek said he and Cornblum split nearly $10 million in profits from their insider trading, the legal publication reports.
As discussed in previous ABAJournal.com posts, Cornblum committed suicide earlier this week, on the eve of his scheduled plea. He was 39 years old.
Earlier coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Ex-Dorsey Partner Kills Himself on Eve of Insider Trading Deal”
ABAJournal.com: “Dorsey & Whitney Fires Partner as Insider Trading Probe Continues”
