Sentencing of David Rubin and his firm, CDR Financial Products Inc., for charges related to bid-rigging of municipal investment contracts, has been postponed by a federal judge until June 28.
In court documents filed in recent days, Rebecca Meiklejohn, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, requested the delay because “the government is close to deciding whether Rubin may have additional opportunities to cooperate with ongoing investigations of this office.”
Rubin, who pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy for his role in a scheme to rig bids for municipal bond investment contracts, had been scheduled to be sentenced on March 22.
Of the 20 individuals charged with participating in the bid rigging scheme by the Justice Department in recent years, only one — former Bank of America executive Phillip Dennis Murphy — has not pleaded guilty or been found guilty. Murphy’s trial is scheduled to start Feb. 3, 2014.
Some market participants have speculated that the Justice Department could issue indictments against additional individuals for bid rigging this year.
Justice Department lawyers have also requested sentencing delays for other cooperating witnesses in recent days. The requests were all approved by judges.
Former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. executive James Hertz, who was to be sentenced March 15, will now be sentenced on June 28, and Mark Zaino, a former UBS employee who had an April 11 sentencing date, will now be sentenced on July 8.
Scheduling for another defendant, former Bank of America employee Alexander Wright, is set for July 9.
Hertz, Zaino and Wright pleaded guilty and testified in the trial last summer against former UBS AG bankers Peter Ghavami, Michael Welty and Gary Heinz.
The Justice Department wanted Hertz, Zaino and Wright to be sentenced after March 19, when the UBS bankers are set to be sentenced, said court documents.
The additional time will allow the government to resolve “overlapping issues of loss and restitution,” U.S. attorneys said in documents filed with the court.
Sentencing for another bid rigger, Douglas Campbell, was changed to Feb. 18, 2014, from March 15 of this year, so that Campbell can testify in the upcoming trial against Murphy, prosecutors said.
