When Rajat Gupta was sentenced to two years in prison last Wednesday, the government finally nailed to the wall the largest scalp it has taken to date in its multiyear investigation of rampant insider trading on Wall Street. He wasn’t the richest—that would be erstwhile hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, the man to whom Mr. Read More
The Securities and Exchange Commission settled insider trading charges today against the former tech company chief financial officer alleged to have leaked insider information to imprisoned Galleon Group hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
In 2006, Xilinx CFO Kris Chellam tipped Mr. Rajaratnam to negative trends in the company’s business at odds with public projections, allowing Galleon to turn a profit of nearly $1 million, according to a press release: Read More
Royal Bank of Scotland managers and traders routinely sought to influence interbank lending rates between 2007 and 2010, and the wrongdoings extend beyond the four traders fired last year, according to Bloomberg. Manipulating the bank’s submissions for Libor and other interbank lending rates would have allowed traders to boost the value of derivatives positions held by RBS, which is 81 percent owned by the British government.
Goodbye Smith Barney: Morgan Stanley is rolling out a name-change for the 75-year-old brand, according to The New York Post. The brokerage, jointly-owned with Citigroup, will be called Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. In its heyday, Smith Barney was known for its advertising slogan: “They make money the old fashioned way: They earn it.” Read More
Raj Rajaratnam didn’t, nor did Rajat Gupta, nor did any of the other seven defendants to stand trial during the government’s ongoing crackdown on insider trading testify in their own defense. Whitman Capital founder Doug Whitman, accused of earning about $1 million by trading on privileged information, did, testifying to his innocence over the course Read More
Finally, sense: As you may recall, Bill Johnson was slated to assume Duke Energy’s chief executive office per the terms of a merger between Duke Energy and Progress Energy. (Mr. Johnson had run Progress Energy before the merger.) Well, Mr. Johnson did assume the office, but on the next day he left the company, scooping Read More
Whither Europe: Greece’s leading pro-bailout party—conservative New Democracy, which won Sunday’s elections, and socialist Pasok—are still negotiating to form a coalition to govern the teetering nation. Assuming a deal gets done, the first task will be to convince Europe to rewrite the Greek rescue agreement to provide more time—and financing—to meet Read More
A former marketing executive at AT&T pled guilty to insider trading charges after providing sales data for the Apple iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry to a so-called expert network, said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement.
Alnoor Ebrahim, 57, of Alpharetta, Georgia, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire Read More
Whither Europe: “The Spanish government has very limited financial market access,” Moody’s said in a statement yesterday to announce the ratings company had cut Spain’s grade three levels to Baaa3, one level above junk. Spain’s borrowing cost on 10-year bonds hovered near 7 percent, up from 5.1 percent at the beginning of the year. Moody’s also cut Cyprus’s grade on fears of contagion following the results of the Greece’s June 17 elections.
The downgrade didn’t prevent Spain’s Amancio Ortega, founder of retail giant Inditex, from becoming Europe’s richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.
“We have no sense that European partners will follow this tactic of blackmail heard from some quarters and stop funding,” Alex Tsipras, leader of Greece’s anti-bailout Syriza party told Bloomberg Television. Rather, Mr. Tsipras thinks that Greece can break the terms of the European rescue agreement signed by a previous Greek government without being forced to exit the eurozone. Read More
And it had nothing to do with Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs chief executive officer whose presence in Judge Jed Rakoff’s courtroom last week lent a few light moments to what has been a tedious undertaking. No, we’re talking about news that Mark Schwartz, the banker who headed Goldman’s Asian operations from 1999 Read More
Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. chief executive accused of leaking corporate secrets to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, will not testify in his own defense, according to a letter sent by Mr. Gupta’s lead attorney Gary P. Naftalis to Judge Jed Rakoff yesterday:
“We have the spent the last day reviewing Read More
