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Former Prosecutor from Shuttered Antitrust Division Office Joins White Collar Firm
Joan Marshall who prosecuted the worldwide vitamins cartel and brought a series of fraud cases in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, has joined the firm as a partner. Previously, Ms. Marshall was with the US DOJ Antitrust Division in the Dallas Field Office. She is the tenth former DOJ prosecutor to join the new boutique law firm in less than a year.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Aug. 6, 2013 – WASHINGTON, D.C. — GeyerGorey LLP is pleased to announce that Joan E. Marshall, a former Department of Justice prosecutor, has joined the firm as partner. Ms. Marshall will open a new office for the firm, in Dallas, where she will be resident.
Ms. Marshall comes to GeyerGorey from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, where she also served as a prosecutor on the Department’s Disaster Fraud Task Force and its predecessor, the Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force. While with the Department of Justice, Ms. Marshall supervised numerous multi-agency investigations of bid rigging, price fixing, mail fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice.
Ms. Marshall had the distinction of breaking the Dallas Field Office’s acclaimed vitamins cartel case and helped to devise, structure and carry out what became one of the most comprehensive international investigations and prosecutions of all time, resulting in more than $1 billion in collected criminal fines. She led the Antitrust Division’s bribery prosecutions involving construction of the levees surrounding New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Her experience spans investigations and prosecutions involving numerous industries including wholesale groceries, milk, seafood, medical equipment, oilfield supplies, military moving and storage, road and building construction, and municipal finance.
“We are thrilled that Joan has decided to join us,” said Hays Gorey. “She adds deep experience with numerous enforcement agencies and compliments our experience in key industries like oil and gas exploration, not to mention the fraud piece. Our corporate compliance and competition expertise is a perfect fit in the Dallas-Ft. Worth market, which has the largest concentration of corporate headquarters in the United States.”
Ms. Marshall is a frequent speaker on antitrust enforcement and fraud prevention and detection and has developed numerous training programs. She is a recipient of the United States Department of Justice, Assistant Attorney General’s Award and certificates of appreciation from the United States Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, and the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, Major Procurement Fraud Unit.
Robert Zastrow, who was Verizon’s Assistant General Counsel for 15 years before co-founding the firm in October 2012, added, “Joan’s extensive background and expertise nicely complements our firm’s unique philosophy and enriches our solid bench in the White Collar world.” Co-founder, Brad Geyer added: “We are very involved in servicing the government contractor and the non-profit and non-governmental organization community and we are excited to roll in Joan’s disaster fraud experience into our overall product offerings. It is also unusual to have career prosecutors in one firm that worked on the highest profile matters on both the criminal and civil worlds. Joan will give us a strategic presence in the Dallas market, which is home to companies in the airline, technology, energy, banking, medical and defense contracting sectors.”
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., GeyerGorey LLP specializes in white collar criminal defense, particularly investigations and cases involving allegations of economic crimes, such as violations of the federal antitrust laws (price fixing, bid rigging, territorial and customer allocation agreements), procurement fraud, securities fraud, foreign bribery (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) and qui tam (False Claims Act) and other whistleblower actions. The firm also conducts internal investigations of possible criminal conduct and provides advice regarding compliance with U.S. antitrust, anti-bribery and other laws.
Although still a distant second to monopoly, buyer power and monopsony are hot topics in the competition community. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Competition Network (ICN), and American Antitrust Institute (AAI) have studied monopsony and buyer power recently. The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission pay more attention to buyer power in their 2010 merger guidelines than they did in their earlier guidelines. With growing buyer concentration in commodities such as coffee, tea, and cocoa, and among retailers, buyer power is a human rights issue. (Continue Reading)
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Allen Grunes shared his perspective with Bloomberg News regarding the proposed Publicis-Omnicom Merger. Click Below:
Allen Grunes was asked for his views on the proposed merger of AT&T and Leap Wireless International. (Grunes and Maurice Stucke were the authors of an influential antitrust analysis of the attempted AT&T/T-Mobile merger in 2011.) Please click on the linked article below:
The American Antitrust Institute, a Washington D.C. organization, has written a letter to the United States Sentencing Commission recommending that fines for antitrust violations be increased. The recommendation grows out of work done by Professors John Connor and Bob Lande, who have been studying whether the penalties (including fines, jail time, and civil liability) adequately deter would-be price fixers. Their study, which looks at a significant amount of data over many years, suggests that price fixing is under-deterred, and that it therefore can be a rational business decision for firms to illegally fix prices, even in the current era of large fines, big jail sentences and private treble damages cases. They specifically point out that while the Guidelines assume that price fixing raises prices by an average of 10% over what prices would be in a competitive market, there is evidence that this estimate is too low, and should be revised to 20%, if not higher.
http://www.antitrustinstitute.
Click Here: The Hill: Lobbying World (June 25, 2013)