In this episode, host Jonathan Havens, co-chair of Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr’s Food, Beverage and Agribusiness (FBA) Practice, speaks with Tony Pavel, Senior Food Lawyer and Global Food Law Team Leader at Cargill, a global food, agricultural, financial and industrial products company. These former colleagues discuss how food law has grown more complicated over the years, particularly in relation to FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), traceability, the increasing globalization of supply chains, and consumers demanding labeling transparency and vast product information. They also discuss potential regulatory changes on the horizon given both technological advances in data-driven areas, such as rapid testing, and the beginning of the Biden Administration.
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This summer the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) issued its first award since August 2016. On July 12, 2018, the CFTC announced a $30 million award, which was only the fifth award under the CFTC’s whistleblower program and the largest since the program’s creation in 2011.
As we have previously noted here, in Digital Realty Trust, Inc. v. Somers, the United States Supreme Court will decide how to interpret the term “whistleblower” under the Dodd-Frank Act, and how to apply the term to the Act’s anti-retaliation provisions.
A trial court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania recently ruled that the whistleblower protections of the Dodd-Frank Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (“SOX”) do not necessarily apply to employees of private entities, even if those entities perform work for publicly-traded companies. The court reached this conclusion in dismissing the Plaintiff’s complaint in Reyher v. Grant Thornton LLP, No. 16-CV-1757.
The Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Jeb Hensarling, R-Tex., recently issued a memo outlining a plan to implement sweeping changes to a bill he introduced last year known as the Financial CHOICE Act. Hensarling’s five-page memorandum, titled “CHOICE Act 2.0 Changes,” outlines revisions to the draft legislation which could strip significant power from the SEC and sharply impact that agency’s Whistleblower Program.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced on April 4, 2016 that it awarded over $10 million to a whistleblower. This is the largest award made by the CFTC’s Whistleblower Program.
On September 10, 2015, the Second Circuit held that an employee who reports wrongdoing internally -- but not to the SEC -- is protected under the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act. In Berman v. Neo@Ogilvie LLC, the plaintiff, a finance director of the defendant, alleged that he was fired after internally reporting that some of the defendant’s practices amounted to accounting fraud. He did not timely report any allegedly unlawful activities to the SEC.