Paul Monnin is a Litigation and Regulatory practice partner who focuses on white collar criminal matters and complex civil litigation.

From 2002 to 2008, Mr. Monnin served as an Assistant United States Attorney with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta. He served as deputy chief of the Economic Crime Section from 2006 to 2008. In that capacity, Mr. Monnin supervised a staff of 24 federal prosecutors, four paralegals, and a forensic auditor. He established and enforced district prosecution guidelines and strategic initiatives for economic crime offenses and screened and approved criminal investigations referred by federal law enforcement agencies and federal financial regulators.

During his service as a federal prosecutor, Mr. Monnin represented the United States in criminal matters involving securities fraud, perjury, obstruction of justice, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, health care fraud, tax fraud, Social Security fraud, money laundering, false claims, asset forfeiture, alien smuggling, immigration and employment document fraud, threats to federal officials, and conspiracy. He successfully tried 12 cases to verdict, and his more noteworthy prosecutions include:

• The conviction of the promoter of a $62 million investment scheme involving more than $20 million in economic losses to more than 1,000 victims, related to a national offering of fraudulent real estate investment partnership interests;
• The conviction of a registered commodities trading advisor and commodity pool operator in connection with the collapse of a $25 million commodities pool in which more than 100 investors suffered financial losses that totaled more than $21 million;
• The conviction, following a two-week jury trial that included testimony from SEC enforcement staff personnel, of the president and chief executive officer of a publicly traded biotechnology company for securities fraud and perjury related to issuing press releases falsely claiming FBI interest in the company’s post-9/11 anti-anthrax products;
• The indictment, fugitive investigation, and arrest of the principal officer of a hedge fund complex in which more than 300 investors lost close to $100 million, including the defendant’s theft of more than $20 million of investor assets;
• The conviction, following a two-and-a-half-week jury trial, of the principal shareholders of a $27 million dollar construction company for filing false corporate and personal income tax returns that attempted to conceal their skimming of more than $4 million in company assets to fund, among other things, construction of their personal residences;
• The conviction, following a week-long jury trial, of the architect of a $29 million fraudulent investment scheme, which included laundering more than $7 million of stolen investor assets through casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City;
• The conviction, after a two-and-a-half-week jury trial, of a five-defendant mortgage fraud conspiracy that obtained more than $6 million in fraudulent loans over a ten-week period;
• The conviction, following a two-week jury trial, of husband and wife labor brokers who smuggled more than 7,000 illegal alien laborers from Mexico into the United States, for which they realized more than $2 million in seized criminal proceeds;
• The conviction, after a two-week jury trial, of the principal officer of a finance company for submitting false collateral reports and fraudulently diverting assets from a $45 million line of credit underwritten by several federally insured financial institutions;
• The conviction of a registered securities broker for fraudulently liquidating and laundering more than $6.6 million of his clients’ annuity contracts;
• The conviction of the chief compliance officer of a registered investment advisor for converting and laundering more than $6.1 million of client investor assets;
• The conviction, after an eight-day jury trial, of a registered tax preparer for filing more than $750,000 in false electronic tax returns over a three-week period;
• The indictment and fugitive investigation of the chief investor relations officer of a publicly traded telecommunications company for insider trading (based on misappropriation of his employer’s non-public earnings reports), perjury, and obstruction of an SEC regulatory investigation;
• The conviction, after a one-week jury trial, of a defendant for making death threats against a United States district court judge (who testified at trial), and threats of bodily harm against court staff and United States probation officers; and
• The conviction, following a three-week jury trial, of the debtor on a multimillion-dollar factoring agreement with a federally insured bank for submitting false accounts receivable documentation and fraudulently diverting loan proceeds to his personal use.

Mr. Monnin was the principal prosecutor within the Atlanta US Attorney’s Office responsible for conducting parallel enforcement actions with the Atlanta, DC, Chicago, and New York enforcement staffs of the SEC, CFTC, and FTC, including actions in connection with their court-appointed receivers. These matters involved grand jury investigations and audit and special committee investigations by publicly traded entities of alleged accounting fraud, stock manipulation, insider trading, director and officer self-dealing, false statements, and regulatory obstruction, and included eliciting testimony and documentary evidence from subject company CEOs, CFOs, inside and outside auditors, and outside analysts. Mr. Monnin also organized and managed a corporate fraud working group, focusing on new and developing cases and parallel enforcement initiatives, comprised of representatives from the SEC’s Atlanta District Office, the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service and the IRS-Criminal Investigation Division.

Mr. Monnin has been a speaker or panelist at many business crime-related seminars sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Continuing Legal Education, the Business Law Institute, and various government agencies and private accounting and consulting firms. He has been interviewed on criminal matters by national and local print and broadcast media, including The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg News, The Atlanta Business Chronicle, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mr. Monnin was previously in private practice from 1997 to 2002 at Winston & Strawn, LLP in Chicago, where he was the principal associate on a trial team that obtained a $10 million verdict in connection with a month-long jury trial of patent infringement claims. He was also the principal associate responsible for developing evidence and drafting a series of white papers that, following a multi-year grand jury investigation, led the DOJ to decline to prosecute a major Chicago-area insurance carrier on allegations of bad faith claims arising out of the 1994 Northridge, California earthquake.