Marc Gabelli just beat the SEC in the highest court in the land.

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Gamco [profile] scion and in favor of former Gabelli Funds chief operating officer Bruce Alpert on a statue of limitations issue.

The statute of limitations for the SEC to bring this case is five years. Yet the market-timing the regulatory agency claims Alpert and Gabelli allowed in Gabelli Funds ended in 2002, six years before the SEC sued the duo in 2008. A federal district court tossed the SEC's case, yet in 2011 the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals resurrected it, agreeing with the SEC's contention that the five-year deadline clock doesn't start ticking until the SEC discovers the violation.

In September 2012 the Supreme Court agreed to hear Gabelli and Alpert's appeal. The justices heard oral arguments in January. Then yesterday in an 11-page, unanimous opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts overturned the Second Circuit's ruling, reiterating that the five-year clock for the SEC to bring such charges starts not when the alleged violations are discovered but when they last occurred. And in the case of Alpert and Gabelli, they waited six years, one year too long.

The ABA Journal, AdvisorOne, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, the Courthoust News Service, FINalternatives, the Financial Times, Forbes, Forbes again, PBS' Frontline, InvestmentNews, MarketWatch, the New York Times, Pensions & Investments, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all covered yesterday's ruling. The WSJ also posted a separate editorial praising the decision and attacking the SEC for pursuing the case in the first place. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE