The Securities and Exchange Commission was formally charged six men in an insider trading case.
The group includes Anthony Longoria, a former manager at AMD, as well as Daniel DeVore, a manager at Dell as well as Marvell consultant Winifred Jiau, Flextronics executive Walter Shimoon and two employees of investment research firm Primary Global.
Longoria, Shimoon as well as the primary Global employees were arrested in an FBI sting back in December. The original accusation involved passing on confidential product information in exchange for money to Primary Global. These new SEC charges apparently stem from new findings from an ongoing investigation as the organization alleges that Longoria, DeVore, Jiau and shimoon “obtained material, non-public confidential information about quarterly earnings and performance data and shared that information with hedge funds and other clients of PGR who traded on the inside information.” According to the SEC, the illegally provided information resulted in profits in the amount of about $6 million. “Company executives and other insiders moonlighting as consultants to hedge funds cannot blatantly peddle their company’s confidential information for personal gain,” Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement.
According to the SEC, Longoria collected more than 130,000 in consulting fees from primary Global, while DeVore was paid about $145,000, Shimoon $13,600 and Jiau $200,000. The complaint filed by the SEC asks to prevent Longoria, Shimoon and DeVore from acting as an officer or director of any registered public company, to repay any gains including interest and pay additional penalties. Similar cases in the past have also resulted in jail time.
PARIS – FRENCH Industry Minister Eric Besson on Thursday warned the country was facing ‘economic war’ following an industrial espionage scandal at automaker Renault.
‘Unfortunately, the affair appears serious,’ Mr Besson said on RTL radio, after discussing the issue with Renault management.
‘The expression ‘economic war’, while sometimes outrageous, for once is appropriate,’ he said, calling for improvements in industrial security at companies who receive public money.
‘It appears to concern the electric car, but I do not want to go further,’ said Mr Besson.
Renault said on Wednesday it had suspended three managers for leaking secrets about electric cars, with the company staking its future on environmentally friendly vehicles and aiming to produce them for the general market. — AFP
By Stephen Grocer
Seems Qualcomm’s bid to buy Atheros was one piece of information about Atheros that didn’t leaked.
Atheros and other semiconductor companies such as AMD, Marvell Technology, Broadcom and Intel have been embroiled in the insider trader probes the past two years.
Atheros’s name has come up twice, in fact. One of its executives tipped hedge fund manager Ali Far to the firm’s financial performance for the fiscal quarter ended in December 2008. In the spearate but related “expert network” probe, Don Ching Trang Chu, an employee at Primary Global Research, allegedly provided inside information about Atheros directly to Richard Choo-Beng Lee, who was a cooperating witness in the Galleon case and co-founded Spherix Capital with Far.
So was there any suspicious Atheros trading before last week’s deal?
The short answer: No.
Atheros’s shares opened the day at $37.14 and were trading at $37.18 at 3 p.m. when the New York Times broke the news of an impending deal. As the chart below shows, it shares did not surge until after the news came out. Often in recent years, there is a jump in shares of a target company in the days before a transaction is announced.  For example, Merck’s acquisition of Schering-Plough. Shares and options, which had been languishing for more than a year, had spikes in the days before the $32.6 billion offer.
What about the options market? Deal Journal colleague Brendan Conway reports
In the stock-options market, the big Atheros action came only after the first reports of the deal. There were dribs and drabs of trading activity Monday and then a tidal wave of volume on Tuesday afternoon that continued into Wednesday.
In the options market, a favorite venue for traders who make speculative takeover bets, it’s always possible that some of the dribs were the work of traders acting on inside information. But, as in the stock market, market participants weren’t crying foul the way they often do when others have acted illegally on their knowledge.
A French official, meanwhile, sought to play down the possibility of Chinese involvement in the matter, saying the government would wait for the results of an investigation.
In an interview published Saturday in the French newspaper Le Monde, Patrick Pelata, Renault’s chief operating officer, said that an internal investigation that began in August had led the company to conclude it was the target of “a system organized to collect economic, technological and strategic information to serve interests abroad.”
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PARIS (AFP) – French automaker Renault suspects that top managers suspended for alleged industrial espionage were supplying details of the company’s electric cars to China, a newspaper and officials said Friday.
The daily Le Figaro cited “several internal sources” at the company as saying that Renault and the French secret service suspect Chinese involvement in the affair.
“Suspicions are indeed leading in that direction,” towards China, said Bernard Carayon, a lawmaker for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UM party who has authored several specialist reports on economic intelligence.
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