Spain Is Expected to Extradite Ex-Trader in JPMorgan Case

Federal authorities expect that one of the former JPMorgan Chase employees facing criminal charges in connection with the bank’s multibillion-dollar trading loss in London will eventually be extradited to the United States, a senior prosecutor said on Tuesday.

The former trader, Javier Martin-Artajo, is living in Spain.

Although Mr. Martin-Artajo appears to be fighting extradition after briefly surrendering to police in Spain in August, Spanish authorities are expected to cooperate with prosecutors in New York.

“We have a pretty good extradition agreement with Spain,” Lorin L. Reisner, the chief of the criminal division at the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said on Tuesday. “I expect,” Mr. Reisner said,” that Mr. Martin-Artajo “will return to the U.S. via the extradition process.”

Another former trader charged in the case, Julien Grout, could prove more elusive, Mr. Reisner said. After leaving JPMorgan’s London offices, Mr. Grout returned to his native France, which typically does not extradite its citizens.

“It’s more complicated,” Mr. Reisner said.

Mr. Reisner made his remarks at a conference in Midtown Manhattan on white-collar crime. The conference featured panels with leading government officials and criminal defense lawyers, as well as senior lawyers from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which under new leadership has tried to step up its enforcement. Some of those efforts are directed at JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank, which is the target of a wider legal crackdown.

The Justice Department is in settlement talks with JPMorgan and is seeking more than $11 billion from the bank over its sale of questionable mortgage securities. The bank also faces lingering investigations into its debt collection practices and its dealings with Bernard L. Madoff, the creator of a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

The investigation into JPMorgan’s trading loss in London reached a peak in August when the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, along with the F.B.I., announced charges against the two. At the heart of the case was the contention that the two had deliberately “manipulated and inflated the value” of a derivatives bet to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Both Mr. Martino-Artajo and Mr. Grout deny wrongdoing. Bruno Iksil, a third former trader, known as the “London Whale” for his role in the outsize derivatives trade, reached a nonprosecution deal with the government in exchange for testifying against his former colleagues.

Weeks after the charges, authorities took aim at JPMorgan for “lacking effective internal controls to detect” the traders’ conduct. The civil settlement â€" which resolved investigations from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the British Financial Services Authority and the S.E.C. â€" imposed $920 million in penalties on the bank. The deal also required the bank to admit wrongdoing.

At the legal industry conference on Tuesday, the co-head of the S.E.C’s enforcement unit trumpeted JPMorgan’s admission as evidence of a broader policy shift. For decades, the agency permitted defendants to settle cases without acknowledging their misconduct.

“We will demand admissions, and if the defendant isn’t prepared to agree, we will litigate at trial,” said Andrew Ceresney, the S.E.C. official, who gave the keynote address at the conference, run by the Practising Law Institute.

The change has already begun to “bear fruit,” Mr. Ceresney said, citing the JPMorgan case and a settlement with the hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners. Like a guilty plea in a criminal case, an admission of wrongdoing is important to hold the defendant accountable and provides a form of catharsis to the investing public, he said.

Mr. Ceresney, a former defense lawyer at the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, was recused from the JPMorgan case because he once defended the bank. He was hired by the agency’s new chairwoman, Mary Jo White, who also came from Debevoise. Both were federal prosecutors earlier in their careers.

Five months into the S.E.C. job, Mr. Ceresney argued that the new leadership had brought improvements to the agency, which was sharply criticized for missing financial frauds like the Madoff Ponzi scheme and failing to charge any top Wall Street executives tied to the financial crisis. “We wanted to bring the swagger back to the enforcement division, and I think we’re doing that,” he said.

The agency continues to face criticism. Even in the JPMorgan settlement, lawmakers and other critics questioned why the agency had charged the traders but declined to punish the bank’s leadership.

In one sign of change, however, the S.E.C. separately announced on Tuesday that it was paying more than $14 million to a whistle-blower who provided information that led to an enforcement action, by far the most significant payout in the two-year history of its whistle-blower office.

The agency did not identify the tipster or the case this person helped build. But under the whistle-blower program, created under the Dodd-Frank Act, tipsters can reap up to 30 percent of the money the S.E.C. collects when imposing fines, suggesting that the relevant case was a big one.

The white-collar crime conference coincided with the first day of the government shutdown. Mr. Reisner, the federal prosecutor, described the shutdown as a “complete mess” for his already resource-constrained office.

He said that with 10 criminal trials under way in Federal District Court in Manhattan, he spent much of Monday seeking to prevent the government paralegals working on those cases from being furloughed.