Quattrone Free During Appeal

Nine days before he was due in federal prison, former Silicon Valley star technology investment banker Frank Quattrone was granted permission Tuesday to remain free while he appealed his obstruction-of-justice conviction.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals overruled a lower court judge who had ordered Quattrone to report to prison Oct. 28 to begin serving an 18-month sentence.

Quattrone, 49, hugged his lawyers after the decision was announced in a Manhattan courtroom.

“We remain very confident that the conviction will be reversed and that Frank Quattrone will not have to serve a day in jail,” Quattrone spokesman Bob Chlopak said in a statement.

Quattrone was convicted in May of hindering a federal probe into how his bank, Credit Suisse First Boston, had allocated shares of initial public offerings of stock during the late-1990s Internet boom.

The banker, who took prominent companies such as Amazon.com Inc. public during that period, was the highest-profile Wall Street figure since junk-bond pioneer Michael Milken to face a criminal conviction.

His lawyers contend that the trial judge, Richard Owen, made inconsistent rulings about evidence and testimony that kept Quattrone from getting a fair trial in federal court in Manhattan.

Federal prosecutors and the defense had agreed that Quattrone should be allowed to remain free on bail while he appealed, but Owen had ordered him to report to prison.

The appeals court judges seemed to focus on that agreement as they questioned both sides during brief arguments Tuesday morning before announcing their decision.

Quattrone endorsed an e-mail Dec. 5, 2000, that encouraged bankers at CSFB to “clean up those files” before the holidays. At the time, federal investigators were looking into the bank’s stock-allocation practices.

Quattrone has maintained that he did not know the scope of the inquiry and was simply following CSFB policy, which called for routine destruction of some outdated documents.