Partner Authors Article For Bloomberg On Operation Varsity Blues

BCLP Partner Andrey Spektor authored an article published Nov. 8 by Bloomberg about a potential legal flaw that underpins some of the government’s recent high-profile fraud indictments and convictions, including in the “Varsity Blues” case.  In United States v. Yates, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, vacated convictions of two bankers on the same day that a jury returned a guilty verdict against two of the Varsity Blues parents.  The schemes and charges were different but, as Andrey explained, one issue united them.  “The fundamental problem for the government is the mismatch between legal theory and reality,” Andrey wrote.  Drawing on Yates and the Supreme Court’s opinion in the famous “Bridgegate” prosecution, Andrey argued that “when the target of the deception is one person or entity (schools in the Varsity Blues case) and the victim who suffers the direct harm is another (the qualified but rejected college applicant who was the last one out), the loss to the victim is necessarily the byproduct of the scheme, rather than its object.”