SEC Announces Departure of Enforcement Director Gurbir S. Grewal

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the Division of Enforcement, will depart the agency, effective Oct. 11, 2024. Upon Mr. Grewal’s departure, Sanjay Wadhwa, the Division’s Deputy Director, will serve as Acting Director, and Sam Waldon, the Division’s Chief Counsel, will serve as Acting Deputy Director.

“We have been incredibly fortunate that such an accomplished public servant, Gurbir Grewal, came to the SEC to lead the Division of Enforcement for the last three years,” Chair Gary Gensler said. “Every day, he has thought about how to best protect investors and help ensure market participants comply with our time-tested securities laws. He has led a Division that has acted without fear or favor, following the facts and the law wherever they may lead. I greatly enjoyed working with him and wish him well.”

Chair Gensler added, “I’m pleased that Sanjay Wadhwa has said yes to taking on the Acting Director role. He has served as part of a remarkable leadership team, along with Gurbir, as Deputy Director and has been with the agency for more than two decades. He has shown strong leadership, is widely respected among his colleagues, and has provided invaluable counsel to the Commission. I’m pleased that Sanjay will be joined by Sam Waldon, currently Enforcement’s Chief Counsel, who is becoming Acting Deputy Director. Sam has provided sound advice to the Division and the Commission on critical legal issues.”

“While we have faced and overcome many challenges over the last three plus years, there has been one constant throughout: the public servants of the Enforcement Division stand ready to do everything they can to protect investors and market integrity. Their expertise, professionalism, and dedication are, indeed, unparalleled, and it has been the privilege of a lifetime to have been able to call them colleagues,” said Mr. Grewal. “From recalibrating penalties and remedies to confronting emerging risks to holding issuers, insiders, and gatekeepers accountable, I am incredibly proud of all that we’ve accomplished as a Division during my tenure. I am grateful to Chair Gensler not just for the opportunity to lead the Division, but also for his unwavering commitment to investor protection and support of a robust enforcement program.”

As Enforcement Director, Mr. Grewal prioritized restoring investor trust and confidence in the financial markets by emphasizing proactive enforcement initiatives and working to create a culture of compliance among market participants. To that end, the Division recalibrated remedies so they were viewed as more than simply the cost of doing business and provided meaningful specific and general deterrence to wrongdoers, and the Division moved with urgency to address emerging risk areas. Under Mr. Grewal’s leadership, the Division also prioritized holding insiders, industry professionals, and gatekeepers accountable for their securities law violations, rooting out fraudulent conduct, enforcing disclosure and recordkeeping requirements, and enforcing whistleblower protections. At the same time, Mr. Grewal redoubled efforts to promote self-policing, self-reporting, and remediation by market participants through, among other things, highlighting the benefits of cooperation in the Commission’s public orders and in his public statements.

During Mr. Grewal’s tenure, the Division of Enforcement recommended, and the Commission authorized, more than 2,400 enforcement matters resulting in orders for more than $20 billion in disgorgement, prejudgment interest, and civil penalties, more than 340 industry bars against individuals, more than $1 billion in awards to whistleblowers, and the return of billions of dollars to harmed investors.

For example, under Mr. Grewal’s leadership, the Division recommended and the Commission authorized more than 100 enforcement actions addressing widespread noncompliance in the quickly growing crypto space, including against the operators of the largest crypto asset trading platforms in the world and the operator of the largest crypto asset trading platform in the United States for depriving investors of crucial investor protections by not complying with the registration provisions of the federal securities laws.

Further, the Division brought a number of enforcement matters to protect investors in private funds from market manipulation and misleading or inadequate disclosures and controls regarding conflicts of interest and fees and valuation.

The Division also prioritized rooting out insider trading. The SEC brought enforcement actions in a wide range of situations where insiders abused access to material non-public information (MNPI), including so-called classic insider trading as well as the first trial finding a defendant liable for insider trading in the shares of a peer company. The SEC also brought actions addressing fraud in block trading and against firms for failing to maintain policies designed to prevent misuse of MNPI.

To address failures among gatekeepers, during Mr. Grewal’s tenure, the Commission brought enforcement actions for a range of violations, including a massive fraud by an audit firm affecting more than 1,500 SEC filings – one of the largest ever wholesale failures by a gatekeeper – and charging another firm with hundreds of auditor independence violations.

Additionally, at Mr. Grewal’s direction the Division launched a proactive initiative in December 2021 to ensure that regulated entities, including broker-dealers, investment advisers, and credit ratings agencies, complied with their recordkeeping requirements, which are foundational to investor protection and the SEC’s ability to investigate other forms of misconduct. To date, that initiative has resulted in charges against more than 100 firms and more than $2 billion in penalties for failures to maintain and preserve electronic communications. In each case, the firms admitted that their conduct violated federal securities laws and have begun implementing improvements to their compliance policies and procedures.

Immediately before joining the SEC, Mr. Grewal was the Attorney General for the State of New Jersey from Jan. 2018 through June 2021. Prior to that, he served as the Bergen County Prosecutor, the chief law enforcement officer for New Jersey’s most populous county. Earlier in his career, Mr. Grewal served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, where he was Chief of the Economic Crimes Unit, and an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where he was assigned to the Business and Securities Fraud Unit. He was also an attorney in private practice. Mr. Grewal holds a J.D. from the College of William & Mary, Marshall-Wythe School of Law, and a B.S. in Foreign Service from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Mr. Wadhwa has served as Deputy Director of the Enforcement Division since Aug. 2021. During his tenure as Deputy Director, Mr. Wadhwa has worked closely alongside Mr. Grewal to execute the SEC’s Enforcement agenda and to further the agency’s mission to protect investors. Before becoming Deputy Director, Mr. Wadhwa was the Senior Associate Director of the Division of Enforcement in the New York Regional Office (NYRO), Deputy Chief of the Market Abuse Unit, and Assistant Director in NYRO.

During his career, Mr. Wadhwa led several critical investigations in NYRO, including the office’s sustained and successful efforts to root out institutional insider trading, which resulted in successful enforcement actions against hedge fund advisers such as Galleon Management and S.A.C. Capital, among others, and prominent Wall Street figures such as Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam, the former head of McKenzie Consulting, Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, and the founder of S.A.C. Capital, Steven A. Cohen. While in NYRO, Mr. Wadhwa also oversaw the agency’s industry-wide investigation from 2016 to 2020 into abusive American depositary receipts pre-release practices, which resulted in monetary penalties against banks and broker-dealers exceeding $430 million.

Prior to joining the SEC as a staff attorney in Enforcement in 2003, Mr. Wadhwa served as a tax associate at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. Mr. Wadhwa has a B.B.A. from Florida Atlantic University, a J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston, and an LL.M. in taxation from New York University School of Law.

Sam Waldon has served as Chief Counsel for the Division of Enforcement since March 2022. He joined the SEC from the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP, where he was a partner. Mr. Waldon previously served as an Assistant Chief Counsel (2010-2018) and investigative attorney (1996-1998) for the Division of Enforcement.