New York Post – The high-profile insider-trading case against hedge-fund king Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group is getting a high-profile judge who’s earned the nickname on Wall Street of Judge Dread.

US District Court Judge Jed Rakoff is expected to oversee the Securities and Exchange Commission’s case against the billionaire hedgie, who was charged Friday with running a $20 million insider-trading scheme.

On Wall Street, Rakoff has gained notoriety for nixing a $33 million settlement between the SEC and Bank of America over charges the bank hid billions in losses and bonus payments from shareholders in order to push through BofA’s merger with Merrill Lynch.

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Tags: district court judge, hedge fund, hedgie, high profile, judge dread

Biovail’s long-running battle against several hedge funds and analysts it accused of driving down its stock price has provided lots of drama. Two years ago, Manhattan federal district court Judge Richard Owen sanctioned Biovail for using documents, which were under a protective order, to file a separate RICO suit against the hedge funds and analysts.

(Andrew Longstreth wrote a great American Lawyer feature about the embarrassing hearings before Owen in 2007, in which Biovail’s lawyers at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman and Howrey blamed each other for the screw-up.) Then, in February, a couple of plaintiffs lawyers were sanctioned by Newark federal district court Judge Stanley Chesler, who said they’d copied Biovail’s RICO suit in filing a shareholders class against the same hedge funds and analysts. (In a harshly worded ruling (pdf), Chesler also dismissed the suit.)

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Tags: biovail, district court judge, friedman, hedge fund, hedge funds, richard owen, shareholders, stanley chesler