The Boston office of the Securities and Exchange Commission has a new enforcer on the block, but his face isn't entirely unfamiliar to New England's mutual fund industry.
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David Bergers, a 38-year-old attorney who brought cases against some of the region's most prominent financial services firms, was tapped late last week by SEC Commissioner Christopher Cox to replace former Boston District Office Administrator Walter Riccardi. Riccardi was named a deputy director in the SEC's Division of Enforcement in Washington a few months ago.
Bergers previously served as associate district administrator for the Boston office, a position he took in July 2003. Two months after his appointment, the scandal broke.
During his tenure in Boston, Bergers brought market-timing cases against local firms Putnam Investments, MFS Investments and two subsidiaries of Fleet Boston, which is now a unit of Bank of America. According to the SEC, those enforcement actions recovered several millions of dollars for injured investors. Bergers was also active in the investigation and enforcement of significant cases in the areas of insider trading, offering fraud and accounting fraud.
A graduate of Eastern Nazarene College and the Yale Law School, Bergers held several positions in the private sector before joining the SEC in 1998.
In other SEC appointments, Daniel Hawke was named district administrator for the Commission's Philadelphia office. He succeeds acting administrator Joy Thompson, who will return to her full-time post as associate district administrator in Philadelphia.
A graduate of Tulane University and the Boston University School of Law, the 42-year-old Hawke previously served in the SEC's Division of Enforcement in Washington. He joined the SEC from the private sector in 1999 and has supervised several significant enforcement actions, including the Commission's recent case against Estonian traders who used an electronic "spider" program to gain confidential information from a commercial newswire service.
