Legal News

Why Didn?t Thomas Qualls Show Up for Closing Arguments in His Case?

By Dan Slater

Comverse had Kobi. Symbol had Tomo. And Bayou had Sam.

Did Thomas Qualls, a former currency broker at International Foreign Currency Inc., hit the high road too? Too early to tell, but yesterday, reports the WSJ’s Amir Efrati, an arrest warrant was issued for Qualls, whose commodities fraud trial had begun in mid-October and was set to conclude this week. Qualls, who pleaded not guilty, was free on a $250,000 bond secured by his parents’ home in Florida.

U.S. District Judge Dora Lizette Irizarry approved the arrest warrant after Qualls’ lawyer said the defendant’s sister told him Qualls had taken his belongings out of her Long Island home, where he was staying during the trial. “He’s been cooperative up until now, so I’m concerned something happened to him,” said Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, Qualls’ court-appointed lawyer. He added that his office has been contacting local hospitals and police departments.

“Its very unusual for a defendant to flee mid-trial,” says Kirkland & Ellis’s Andrew Genser, a former federal prosecutor. “Most defendants who consider fleeing would at least wait for the verdict in the hope of an acquittal or hung jury. But if such a defendant thinks the trial is not going well, and that he may be remanded to jail immediately on conviction, he may not stick around to find out how the trial ends.”

Qualls is charged with bilking investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by having them invest in a Garden City, N.Y. firm he ran, which purported to trade in the spot foreign exchange market. He’s also charged with obstructing an investigation of his firm by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and another government agency, allegedly created account statements reflecting currency trades purportedly conducted by his firm, but many of the trades never occurred, according to the indictment.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 04, 2008 (boomark / email).