Again, I don't see an issue with the conflict or lack thereof. How far do you take it - JPM is often a joint underwriter of Berkshire and Berkshire subsidiary debt. Warren is directing some of that business to JPM, instead of exclusively using a consortium of banks like BAC, WFC, GS that Berkshire has an equity interest in. Is he directing Berkshire business to JPM to help his personal holding in JPM at the expense of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' interest to have more business at BAC WFC and GS? It gets goofy quickly. The SRG equity was uninvestable by Berkshire. The SRG loan was investable by Berkshire. Pretty clean conflict resolution.
The Sokol situation was a little more nuanced than most of the posts suggest. There was a very detailed board of directors report on the matter. Sokol didn't own Lubrizol until Citi investment bankers included it in a list of acquisition targets he was looking at for Berkshire, in his capacity as a Berkshire manager. Then he pitched the company to Buffett who dismissed it - not interested. David Sokol then bought some Lubrizol stock. At that point the inside information he had was, "David Sokol likes Lubrizol, Warren Buffett not interested in buying Lubrizol." After that he got filled on some more GTC buy orders for additional shares. At some point, Warren met with Lubrizol management and changed his mind - liked the company and became interested in bidding for it after all.
The sin with Sokol was a violation of Berkshire's trust because he didn't tell Warren all of the details. He told Warren he owned the stock, but not when he purchased it or how he came to be aware of / interested in it (recently and through a Citi investment banker with Berkshire as the client). It wasn't a criminal offense and was never prosecuted for the simple reason that the only insider information Sokol had at the time of his purchases was, "Warren Buffett is NOT interested in buying Lubrizol."
