David Paul Weber is the former Assistant Inspector General at the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In this role, David served as the SEC’s Chief Investigator and directed all criminal, civil, and administrative investigations into fraud, waste, or abuse concerning SEC programs on a nationwide basis. David’s notable cases included reporting misconduct in the Bernard L. Madoff and R. Allen Stanford investigations. Mr. Weber now uses this skill set to assist and defend clients and to investigate wrongdoing in private practice.
As one recent example, in Winter and Summer 2018, David represented a key witness in the United States v. Paul Manafort criminal prosecution and grand jury investigations and successfully obtained full immunity for his client in exchange for his client’s cooperation and testimony against Mr. Manafort, the President’s former campaign chairman. Ultimately, David’s lawyering, in part, played a role in Manafort’s guilty plea in September 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Weber was a whistleblower who reported allegations about foreign espionage against the stock exchanges, and misconduct in the Bernard L. Madoff and R. Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme investigations. He was terminated months later for supposedly unrelated reasons. He sued the SEC, claiming wrongful termination and retaliation against him for coming forward as a whistleblower. In June 2013, the SEC settled with Weber his whistleblower protection and U.S. District Court lawsuits by reinstating him and paying him $580,000, one of the largest federal whistleblower settlements in US history.
On July 30, 2015, Weber was recognized by six United States Senators and one member of the House of Representatives at the First Congressional Celebration of National Whistleblower Appreciation Day. Weber is now in private practice of law and is a Lecturer and Academic Director of Fraud Management Programs at the University of Maryland, College Park.
In 2015-2016, Weber served as the banking expert who assisted journalists in reviewing information now known as the Panama Papers, pertaining to hundreds of current and former world leaders. In 2017-2018, Weber presented findings from the Paradise Papers, which has now implicated some of the largest accounting firms in the world.
In Spring 2017, Weber was nominated for the American Accounting Association, Forensic Accounting Section, Best Teaching Innovation Award, for training students how to prepare Reports of Investigation into subjects identified in the Panama Papers.
In April 2017, the Panama Papers investigation was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
He is married to Julie Goodwin Weber, a tax, estates and trusts attorney, and has four children.