Banker’s Appeal Refers to Andersen

Lawyers for Frank Quattrone on Friday urged an appeals panel in New York to reverse the former Silicon Valley banker’s guilty verdict, citing this week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned the conviction of accounting firm Arthur Andersen.

In a second brief filed with the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, lawyers for the once-highflying Credit Suisse First Boston financier said Tuesday’s ruling reinforced Quattrone’s argument that jurors should have been instructed that he could be convicted only if he purposely destroyed documents the government was seeking as part of its investigation.

Quattrone, who first filed an appeal in January, was found guilty last year of obstructing federal investigations into CSFB’s financial activities, including witness tampering.

Judge Richard Owen’s “jury charge in this case was wrong,” Quattrone’s lawyer, Mark Pomerantz, said in Friday’s brief. “The conviction must therefore be reversed.”

The filing came three days after a unanimous Supreme Court overturned Andersen’s 2002 conviction for obstructing a government investigation of Enron Corp. The court said instructions given to the jury were flawed because they didn’t require proof that Andersen executives knew that they were doing something wrong when they told staffers to destroy documents.

Quattrone’s brief says the judge in his case didn’t require jurors to find that he knew which documents prosecutors were seeking when he told subordinates to discard records.

Although the Andersen ruling might help Quattrone on the witness-tampering conviction, different language in the other two obstruction-of-justice statutes will make it harder for him to reverse those, said William Mateja, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer in Dallas who was formerly a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s corporate criminal task force.

“It’s very doubtful that he’ll be able to reverse the entirety of the conviction” based on the Andersen ruling, Mateja said.

Megan Gaffney, a spokeswoman for U.S. Atty. David N. Kelley in New York, declined to comment.