Prosecutors for state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer are trying to get access to an overlooked e-mail account held by former New York Stock Exchange chief Dick Grasso.
Yesterday, during a routine hearing in New York State Supreme Court, Spitzer’s office filed a discovery motion related to an additional e-mail account of Grasso’s: [email protected].
A lawyer with the AG’s office declined to comment on whether Grasso’s primary e-mail account, [email protected], has yielded evidence aiding their civil suit.
A lawyer for the NYSE said all of the e-mail traffic for the account would be produced, but declined to characterize it.
Unlike the blockbuster e-mail evidence produced during Spitzer’s previous investigations – especially the global research investigations of 2001 and 2002 – e-mail has so far played a decidedly minor role in his lawsuit to reclaim Grasso’s $190 million exit-pay package.
In crafting the global research settlement of 2003, which saw 10 Wall Street firms fined a total of $1.4 billion and forced to enact sweeping changes in research practices, e-mail produced from Merrill Lynch and Citigroup proved devastating to their defense.