Remember the time Harbinger Capital Partners founder Phil Falcone was a little short on cash, and decided to "borrow" $113 million from a fund in which redemptions had been suspended in order to pay personal taxes? Unfortunately for Big P, the SEC does. (The regulator also recalls he time he allegedly played favorites with Goldman and allegedly manipulated some markets.) Philip Falcone, the billionaire founder of Harbinger Capital Partners LLC, faces a lawsuit from U.S. regulators as soon as this week over claims he improperly borrowed client funds to pay his taxes and gave preferential treatment to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to two people familiar with the matter. Falcone, 49, may also face a market manipulation claim related to trading in bonds of MAAX Holdings Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted to authorize enforcement staff to file the case, the people said. While perhaps not the best news Falcone has received in a while, it likely does not come as a surprise, as the SEC has been talking about the aforementioned offenses since last December (when they tried to get him banned from the securities industry). Either way, Phil, who should probably just not going home tonight unless he wants an earful, is planning to "contest to the suit." SEC Said To Authorize Lawsuit Against Harbinger’s Falcone [Bloomberg]

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story reporting that the Securities and Exchange Commission had "blown" the cover of whistleblower Peter C. Earle. The article claimed that Earle, a former employee of Pipeline Trading Systems turned government informant, had his identity "inadvertently" revealed through a "gaffe" on the part of an SEC lawyer, who showed a Pipeline exec "a notebook from the whistleblower filled with jottings about trades, calls and meetings." The executive was said to have recognized Earle's handwriting and told his colleagues, who had previously suspected but did not know for sure that "Pete's the whistleblower." The story was easy to believe because if you've been keeping up with the SEC over the last number of years, you know that this sound exactly like something they'd accidentally do. Except that whereas the regulator fully copped to, for example, missing Madoff while trying to access ladyboyjuice.com 385 times/day, it says that this accusation? Is bull shit. It did not "inadvertently" "blow" anyone. Here's its strongly worded letter to the Journal saying as much: The Securities and Exchange Commission in no way exposed Peter Earle as a whistleblower, and our use of his notebooks in an investigative deposition was neither "inadvertent" nor a "breach" or "gaffe" ("Source's Cover Blown by SEC," Page One, April 25). It was a deliberate decision, which SEC lawyer Daniel Walfish discussed in advance with his supervisor, who was present for the deposition in which the notebooks were exhibited. Nor did the fully authorized use of the notebooks in any way compromise Mr. Earle or the integrity of the SEC's investigation of the Pipeline Trading Systems matter. Although it was widely known among executives of Pipeline and Milstream Strategy Group that Mr. Earle had approached the SEC after he was terminated from Milstream—a fact volunteered by several witnesses and acknowledged by Mr. Earle long before any use of his notebooks—the SEC declined to confirm his identity and still treated his status as a cooperating witness as confidential. The SEC made sure to obtain all of the notes of the approximately six Milstream traders, and in the SEC's deposition of Gordon Henderson (the supervisor of Mr. Earle and the other traders), the SEC used other traders' notes along with those of Mr. Earle. The use of these traders' notes—highly relevant evidence prepared in the ordinary course of their work at Milstream—in no way revealed whether Mr. Earle or any other trader was or was not cooperating with the SEC. George S. Canellos Director New York Regional Office U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission New York SEC Did Not Blow Source's Cover [WSJ] Earlier: SEC Burns Whistleblower In The Most SEC Way Possible