USA – NEW YORK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Temidayo Aganga-Williams, Selendy Gay PLLC
USAO-SDNY’s Corporate Enforcement and Volun - tary Self-Disclosure Programme for Financial Crimes, a structured framework under which companies that discover certain categories of financial misconduct, self-report to the USAO-SDNY before receiving a subpoena or learning of a government investigation, cooperate fully, remediate the conduct and pay res - titution to victims, receive a declination: no criminal charges, no fines, no monitor. The conditional declina - tion can be expected to arrive shortly after disclosure. At the programme’s launch, SDNY confirmed that it had already issued one conditional declination within a month of a qualifying disclosure. The programme’s most consequential departure from existing Department of Justice (“DOJ”) practice con - cerns aggravating circumstances. Under the then- operative DOJ Criminal Division’s own Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy, a company can be disqualified from receiving a declina - tion based on factors including: • the seriousness of the offence; • the pervasiveness of misconduct within the com - pany; • the severity of harm caused; • past criminal history; and • the involvement of senior leaders. USAO-SDNY’s programme explicitly excludes all those factors from its definition of aggravating cir - cumstances. A company may self-report a pervasive fraud orchestrated by senior leadership that caused significant investor harm and involved a company with prior criminal history and still receive a declination, provided the disclosure is timely and the coopera - tion requirements are met. That is a materially more favourable offer than anything previously available under the DOJ’s own framework and it was New York that was again leading the rewriting of the rules. The USAO-SDNY’s new programme was closely fol - lowed by the DOJ’s March 2026 announcement of a department-wide Corporate Enforcement and Volun - tary Self-Disclosure Policy, suggesting that the pros - ecutorial boldness demonstrated in Manhattan had prompted a national recalibration of how the federal government approaches corporate financial crime.
The relationship between the SDNY programme and the DOJ’s 10 March 2026, department-wide Cor - porate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy remains formally unresolved. The DOJ’s CEP states that it supersedes all component-specific and US Attorney’s Office-specific corporate enforcement policies currently in effect, with the sole exception of the Antitrust Division. On 12 April 2026, at a public event, Clayton addressed this directly, stating that the two policies are not in tension and that SDNY’s programme remains active and continues to accept submissions, characterising reports of supersession as, in the words of attendees, “fake news.” It is clear that New York prosecutors still intend to use carrots and sticks, whether Washington keeps up or not. Prediction Markets: The First Insider Trading Indictment and Its Implications Even as the DOJ was consolidating its corporate enforcement architecture, the USAO-SDNY was stak - ing out new ground in a different direction, using exist - ing fraud and commodity market statutes to prosecute insider trading in prediction markets for the first time. Prediction markets have grown from a niche curios - ity into a multi-billion-dollar industry, with platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi attracting millions of users wagering on everything from election outcomes to geopolitical events. The sector’s explosive growth has been matched by a persistent legal ambiguity – unlike traditional securities markets, where insider trading prohibitions are well-established, prediction markets have occupied a regulatory grey area, with many participants and commentators questioning whether existing law reaches trading on material nonpublic information in these venues. That uncertainty fueled a widespread belief, sometimes explicit, sometimes assumed, that the normal rules simply did not apply. In February 2026, Jay Clayton declared that New York prosecutors would bring clarity, stating publicly that insider trading laws apply equally to prediction mar - kets: “Because it’s a prediction market doesn’t insu - late you from fraud.” Two months later, he signed the first indictment demonstrating just that. On 21 April 2026, the USAO-SDNY unsealed an indict - ment against Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US Army Spe -
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