Glen Point’s Neil Phillips Loses Bid to Undo Fraud Conviction

Neil Phillips, co-founder of UK-based Glen Point hedge fund, lost his appeal to undo a 2023 conviction for commodities fraud after the Second Circuit rejected challenges to, among other things, the law’s extraterritorial reach.

The trial court’s jury instruction—that the government met its burden for extraterritorial application of the Commodities Exchange Act if it proved that Phillips’s activity outside of the United States “had a direct and significant connection with activities in commerce of the United States"—was exactly right, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said.

Phillips claimed the jury instructions failed to define “significant” to ...