Whistleblower News From The Inside -- June 12, 2017

By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team

Goodwill Employee Expected Sympathy After He Saw Co-Worker Crushed. But He Was Fired — Seven days after he saw his co-worker die, crushed by heavy equipment, Dave Goudie returned to work at the Goodwill Outlet on Franklin Boulevard. Goudie, a commercial driver, thought he was psychologically ready to resume his $16.50-an-hour job after a week of paid administrative leave. He said he assumed his bosses would continue to offer sympathy and support, as they had in the days following the Sept. 30, 2016, death of Abraham Nicholas Garza on the front loading dock. Instead, Goudie was ushered into an office and fired by a top executive of Goodwill Industries of Sacramento Valley & Northern Nevada. Goudie said he was issued his final check along with a memo that banned him from Goodwill premises and warned that he could be arrested for trespassing. Sacramento Bee

Inquest Opens Into Case of Whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny — The wife of Alexander Perepilichny does not think he was murdered. The police do not think he was murdered. His postmortem did not point to foul play. And there the strange case of the 44-year-old Russian businessman, who collapsed while jogging in 2012 near his home in the 900-acre private St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, Surrey, might have been closed. But five years on, a new inquest into his death started last week at the Old Bailey, in front of Nicholas Hilliard, the coroner, to try to answer some of the questions that continue to surround Perepilichny’s sudden demise. “There is a strong probability that Alexander Perepilichny was murdered,” Bill Browder, the fund manager who has been a relentless critic of Vladimir Putin, told the inquest. Financial Times

Inside the CFTC’s Enhanced Whistleblower Protections — The Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently adopted amendments that strengthen anti-retaliation protections for whistleblowers by expanding the CFTC’s enforcement authority to include the ability to take enforcement action against employers who retaliate against whistleblowers. These amendments reflect proposed changes to the CFTC’s regulations that the agency issued in August 2016, which we discussed in detail at that time in an article appearing in Law360. The CFTC also adopted proposed amendments to the whistleblower awards process, creating a more transparent and defined mechanism for whistleblowers to pursue award claims. These amendments more closely align the CFTC’s whistleblower awards process and anti-retaliation protections with that of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s program. Law360