A federal jury on Friday found Jesse C. Litvak, a former senior trader at the Jefferies Group, guilty of deceiving his customers about the prices of mortgage-backed securities he sold to them after the financial crisis.
The jury convicted Mr. Litvak on 15 criminal counts, including 10 of securities fraud, ending a trial at Federal District Court in New Haven that lasted about two weeks. His sentence will be determined by a judge at a later hearing.
Mr. Litvak, 39, was accused last year of generating more than $2 million in revenue for Jefferies, where he worked from April 2008 to December 2011, by overcharging his customers through deceitful conduct. Victims were said to have been some of the world’s largest investment firms, including BlackRock and Soros Fund Management. Prosecutors said that Mr. Litvak orchestrated the scheme, in part, to bolster the size of his year-end bonus.
The prosecutors also claimed that the government was a victim of Mr. Litvak’s deception because some of his clients were managing money that was part of the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. The department had chosen nine private firms to invest in toxic mortgage-backed securities to help remove them from the balance sheets of the large banks.
“The kind of false claims made by Litvak were unfit for a used-car lot, let alone a marketplace for mortgage-backed securities,” said George S. Canellos, who was the Security and Exchange Commission’s deputy director of enforcement when Mr. Litvak was charged.
The conviction of Mr. Litvak is considered a victory for the government, which has said it wanted to be aggressive in bringing criminal charges against individuals suspected of misconduct during and after the financial crisis.