Blowing the Whistle: Former Employee’s Suit Against TPG Invokes Whistleblower Provision in Dodd-Frank

TPG Capital’s legal fight with its former spokesman, Adam Levine, may seem a bit lopsided.

After all, TPG Capital manages $67 billion as one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Levine is, well, just one man.

But Levine holds at least one possible ace: Jordan Thomas, the lead attorney for Levine, joined [prior firm] after working at the SEC, where he helped craft the regulatory agency’s whistleblower program. Thomas also represented another self-described whistleblower in a case against a hedge fund in which the fund settled with the SEC for more than $2 million.

Thomas told Buyouts that TPG’s move to sue Levine after he warned the firm about alleged mishandling of how certain expenses were billed amounts to a “textbook example of how not to handle a whistleblower complaint.”