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Mee (Rina) Kim

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M. Rina Kim is a litigation associate, focusing on complex securities and commercial litigation issues surrounding financial statements, disclosures, materiality, and investigations. She has auditing and forensic knowledge in financial statements, books and records, and complex accounting standards, and helps clients transform sophisticated financial contentions into successful resolutions.

Rina is a certified public accountant in Virginia and Washington, D.C., a certified fraud examiner and certified management accountant and a chartered financial analyst candidate. She is also a 2021 Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD) Pathfinder. Rina maintains an active and diverse pro bono practice, with a focus on immigration law, special education rights, and racial justice and interests. She is native in Korean and proficient in Spanish.

Prior to joining Proskauer, Rina was a manager at KPMG Forensic Services, where she worked on several financial statement audits, fraud and compliance risk assessments, internal whistleblower investigation, anti-bribery and FCPA investigations, and project management of process improvement and implementation surrounding commercial mortgage lending practices and the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act compliance.

Rina is president of the Korean American Bar Association of Washington, D.C. where she has been an officer since 2012. She spearheads infrastructural framework to form a coalition of 13 KABAs to address issues on a national scale, such as refuting misleading narrative on Korean history, supporting diverse law student interests, and fighting for racial justice. She was the host committee coordinator and bilingual mistress of ceremony of the 2016 Conference of International Association of Korean Lawyers. Rina was the editor-in-chief of The George Washington International Law Review and president of The George Washington Graduate Korean Students Association. She served as a law clerk at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement and at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Fraud Section.

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Last week, the SEC announced accumulated awards of over $1 billion paid to 207 whistleblowers since its first award in 2012.  Over $500 million was awarded in fiscal year 2021 alone.

The SEC crossed the billion-dollar milestone with awards of $110 million and $4 million to two whistleblowers on September 15, 2021.  The $110 million award marks the second-highest award to date and consists of $40 million stemming from an SEC case and $70 million for related actions by another agency.

On July 30, 2021, the SEC posted 14 Notices of Covered Actions, after which individuals have 90 calendar days to apply for a whistleblower award.  As discussed in our prior post, the SEC publishes these Notices for cases in which the final judgment or order, either by itself or together with other prior judgments or orders in the same action issued after July 21, 2010, results in monetary sanctions exceeding $1 million.

In this post, we briefly survey the 14 Notices of Covered Actions from July 2021.  (See our previous post on the SEC’s Notices of Covered Actions from June 2021.)  Several of the alleged misconducts in the 14 Covered Actions also resulted in parallel criminal actions.

On June 30, 2021, the SEC posted six Notices of Covered Actions, for which individuals have 90 calendar days to apply for a whistleblower award.  As discussed in our prior post, the SEC publishes Notices for cases in which the final judgment or order, by itself or together with other prior judgments or orders in the same action issued after July 21, 2010, results in monetary sanctions exceeding $1 million.

In this post, we briefly survey the six June 2021 Notices of Covered Actions.

On May 27, 2021, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed a securities class action against Carnival Corp. (“Carnival”), which operates the world’s largest cruise company, relating to the company’s health and safety disclosures made prior to and as the COVID-19 pandemic spread.  This decision follows a dismissal of another securities fraud class action against a major cruise operator six weeks earlier by the same court.

Like in the prior case against Norwegian, the Carnival court dismissed the suit upon finding the plaintiffs failed to plead the existence of any statements that were materially false or misleading, and failed to sufficiently allege scienter.  In so doing, it applied traditional principles of federal securities laws to the anything-but-traditional circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fiscal year 2020 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower program. Since its inception through the end of FY2020, the SEC has awarded approximately $562 million to 106 individuals. Even a decade after it was created, the whistleblower program continues to break its own records; in 2020, the SEC issued several awards landing in the top 10 whistleblower awards of all time.

On April 10, 2021, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed a securities class action complaint against Norwegian Cruise Lines (“NCL”) relating to the company’s disclosures made as the coronavirus pandemic was starting to unfold in the United States. In Douglas v. Norwegian Cruise Lines, et al., the court found the plaintiff failed to plead actionable misstatements or omissions and scienter for a claim of securities fraud under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Exchange Act”) and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder.

Thanks to the court’s thorough analysis, this decision serves as a useful overview to those wishing to cruise through the sea of corporate puffery, forward-looking statements, and scienter in the federal securities laws.

As the world waits to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, publicly traded pharmaceutical companies waging in that fight are facing the multifaceted challenge of developing COVID-19 responses, informing the public of their progress, and managing legal challenges related to their efforts. Enter AstraZeneca.

AstraZeneca partnered with Oxford University to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in April 2020, which it later called “AZD1222.” On May 21, 2020, the company announced that the United States government was providing more than $1 billion for the development, production and delivery of the vaccine. Over the course of the next six months, the company continued to make public announcements on further financial support agreements and interim development results on its vaccine progress.

COVID-related securities claims continue to rattle the marketplace. On December 7, a leading plaintiffs firm announced an investigation on behalf of shareholders of The Cheesecake Factory Inc., just days after the SEC announced it was settling charges against the company for making misleading disclosures about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its business operations and financial condition. The SEC’s action was its first charging a public company for actions tied to the worldwide pandemic.