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Quattrone judge declares mistrial { October 24 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/24/news/companies/quattrone/?cnn=yeshttp://money.cnn.com/2003/10/24/news/companies/quattrone/?cnn=yes
Quattrone judge declares mistrial
Jurors fail to reach a verdict on whether ex-CSFB star banker obstructed justice.
October 24, 2003: 2:19 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The judge in the Frank Quattrone case declared a mistrial Friday after jurors failed to decide whether the former star banker obstructed justice during federal investigations into hot stock offerings.
Quattrone, who brought public some of the biggest companies of the dot.com age, was charged with interfering with probes by a grand jury and federal investigators by forwarding an e-mail written by a subordinate urging colleagues to "clean up" their files at Credit Suisse First Boston.
Prosecutors can bring the case to trial for a second time if they wish.
U.S. District Judge Richard Owen declared a mistrial after jurors sent him a note telling him they still were unable to reach a consensus on any of the charges against Quattrone, who is accused of obstruction of justice and witness tampering.
The "consensus is that we will not be able to reach a unanimous vote on any of the three counts," the jurors said in a note, according to court transcripts.
Quattrone, 48, was among the most powerful and successful investment bankers on Wall Street until he resigned under pressure from Credit Suisse First Boston in March of this year.
Credited with predicting the technology boom of the 1990s, Quattrone earned about $120 million in salary and bonus in 2002, according to Reuters.
As a technology banker at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and CSFB, a unit of Switzerland's Credit Suisse Group, Quattrone brought companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Netscape Communications and Amazon.com to market.
That marked a career peak for Quattrone, as several of the companies he took public saw their stock prices soar above their initial offering price, sometimes in a matter of hours. As the tech bubble burst and regulators bore down on its excesses, the IPO market shriveled, banking fees sank and Quattrone's prominence faded.
At the time the infamous e-mail was sent, the grand jury and securities regulators were looking into whether the bank had accepted kickbacks in exchange for hot stock offerings.
Prosecutors charged that Quattrone knew about the investigations and subpoenas that had been served on the bank, and forwarded the e-mail so documents relating to the probe would not come to light.
The defense team argued that Quattrone wasn't aware that the investigations involved any files that would have been kept in his investment banking unit.
Quattrone did testify that while he would occasionally have conversations about stock allocations and may have made some partial lists of allocations before decisions were made, he was not the decision maker and records of how those allocations were made would not have been kept with his investment banking staff.
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-- Reuters contributed to this report.
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