Insider-Trading Arrests Open a Window on Hedge-Fund Culture
by ilene - October 21st, 2009 12:30 am
Insider-Trading Arrests Open a Window on Hedge-Fund Culture
By Barbara Kiviat, courtesy of TIME
On July 19, 2007, Google reported earnings that were lower than what analysts had expected, and the tech company’s stock price dropped 5% — but Raj Rajaratnam made $9 million. Allegedly, the New York hedge-fund manager had gotten a tip that Google’s earnings would be below expectations, so he was prepared with short positions and put options that would become more valuable as the stock price fell. The alleged source of the tip: an employee at an investor-relations firm that helped Google announce its earnings who wanted to be paid for similar informational gems in the future.
If you didn’t already feel like a financial ingenue in the wake of last year’s Wall Street meltdown and Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme, maybe the government’s latest insider-trading case will help put you over the top. Federal prosecutors have charged six people with conspiracy and securities fraud in a series of insider trades that allegedly netted more than $25 million in illegal profits. The defendants include higher-ups at two hedge funds as well as executives at Intel, IBM and the consulting firm McKinsey. Rajaratnam was arrested with the others on Oct. 16, but he promptly paid the $100 million bail so that he could return to work on Monday.
The case is being billed as the largest hedge fund insider-trading case in history — its importance underscored by the fact that the feds got a wiretap to collect evidence, a technique normally reserved for drug busts and organized crime. "This is a monumental step for the government," says Stetson University law professor Ellen Podgor. "This is not the typical way you do a white-collar case."
At issue are a number of purported information leaks, which — if the allegations are proven true — fall into a truly special category of brazenness. For example: a Moody’s bond-rating analyst sharing privileged information that the private-equity firm Blackstone was about to buy Hilton Hotels. A senior vice president at IBM handing over details of Sun Microsystems’s financials, which he had access to only because IBM was contemplating buying Sun. A managing director of Intel passing along the company’s revenue and profit numbers before they were publicly released and later asking his hedge-fund consort for a job with one of his "powerful friends."
Thanks to the FBI’s wiretap, the…