Always Have A Better Plan B Than Asking To Go To The Bathroom And Just Not Coming Back

When Allianz Global Investors hedge fund manager Stephen Bond-Nelson sat down with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he had a plan. Allegedly hatched with his boss, chief investment officer Gregoire Tournant, it was pretty simple: Based on their conviction that the SEC couldn’t possibly have put together everything that contributed to their hedge funds’ collapse early in the COVID-19 pandemic, because really how could the SEC figure out anything quickly even in good times, let alone really bad ones, he’d just lie his head off and expect the his interlocutors to chalk it all up to the coronavirus-induced plunge in the markets.

Unfortunately for them, the SEC had the opposite reaction to quarantine, and things did not go the way Bond-Nelson and his boss allegedly sketched them out. So Bond-Nelson moved on to Plan B:

[SEC Enforcement Director Gurbir] Grewal said that “after Bond-Nelson lied on the record, SEC enforcement staff confronted him on his lies. Realizing that the gig was up, Bond-Nelson took a restroom break during his testimony and he never came back.”

This, of course, was an even worse plan than the first, because the only thing that makes cops even more suspicious than a suspect lying is that suspect running away. At some point during his flight, however, Bond-Nelson appears to have realized that the SEC had already made clear it had the goods on him and would probably be handing them over to the Justice Department. So he did eventually returned to the table, pen in hand to sign his cooperation agreement, with the only fruit of his troubles a likely grueling encounter with the lawyer for his alleged co-conspirator, Tournant, at the latter’s trial, insistently asking why a jury should believe such a treacherous, cowardly lying liar such as himself.

Allianz Cooperator Used Bathroom Break to Run Out on the SEC [Bloomberg via Yahoo!]

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