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January 3, 2010 Fishnet temptress Danielle Chiesi snagged by insider trading scandal Tony Allen-Mills in New York Her mother calls her “my angel”, and “the most honest human being in the whole world”. Yet federal investigators take a different view of Danielle Chiesi, a former beauty queen turned hedge-fund consultant, who has emerged at the centre of the biggest insider trading scandal to shake Wall Street for decades. The publication of federal indictments against the flamboyant chief of a $7 billion (£4.3 billion) hedge fund has provided a glimpse into a secretive world of male-dominated corporate networking that allegedly proved...

The funny part: "I can assure you the Commission takes very seriously credible allegations of market manipulation and, through its examinations and investigations, is actively enforcing the securities laws on an ongoing basis." It's funny cause it's not true. We may, however, change our mind when the SEC issues a formal statement that it is pursuing enforcement and criminal action against the potential FDIC-based leaks on the BNY suspicious stock action last week. The sad part: "We will continue to use all tools at our disposal to aggressively pursue illegal market manipulation by high frequency traders and others." Sad because...

The evidence of foul play ahead of Dubai's debt announcement last week appears overwhelming. A whopping 75% of debt owners might have sold ahead of time. Which means that whoever was left holding Nakheel bonds was truly out of the loop. WSJ: According to Data Explorers, a company that tracks how much of a company's stock or bonds are out on loan, about 75% of institutions holding the sukuk sold their position between the end of August and the end of November. "It's an extraordinary sell-off in a bond so close to maturity, when there was no indication of a...

NEW YORK (AP) | Two lawyers and Wall Street professionals were among 14 people charged Thursday in a widening $53 million insider trading case that has snared one of America's richest men and accused white-collar suspects of using the cover-up tactics of drug dealers. The actions raise to 20 the number of people who have been charged in the case first disclosed last month with the arrests of Galleon Group founder and hedge-fund operator Raj Rajaratnam and five others. .. Mr. Bharara said the defendants borrowed a "page from the drug dealer's playbook" by using anonymous hard-to-trace prepaid cell phones...

U.S. poised to bring more insider trading cases By Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Rachelle Younglai Mon Oct 19, 10:38 pm ET BOSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Fresh from laying charges in the largest hedge fund insider trading case in history, U.S. federal investigators are poised to bring further "significant" cases. The targets will include financial professionals also involved in insider trading, a source familiar with the matter said. It was not immediately clear whether the new cases will be related to the one that ensnared hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam and executives from some of the largest U.S. companies. On Friday, billionaire Raj...

Raj Rajaratnam was ranked by Forbes magazine last year among the 400 richest AmericansThe billionaire founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund and five others were arrested in a $20 million insider trading scandal, federal authorities said Friday. Raj Rajaratnam, 52, ranked by Forbes magazine last year among the 400 richest Americans, was charged with conspiracy and securities fraud along with current and former executives from Bear Stearns, IBM, Intel Capital and McKinsey & Co., according to federal prosecutors. Rajaratnam, was ranked No. 559 by Forbes magazine this year among the world's wealthiest billionaires, with a $1.3 billion net worth....

One of America's wealthiest men was among six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested Friday in a hedge fund insider trading case that prosecutors say generated more than $25 million in illegal profits and should be a wake-up call for Wall Street. Raj Rajaratnam, a partner in Galleon Management and a portfolio manager for Galleon Group, a hedge fund with up to $7 billion in assets under management, was accused of conspiring with others to trade based on insider information about several publicly traded companies, including Google Inc. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara told a news conference it was the...

Jared Polis criticized for "medical tourism" investment By Michael Roberts in Follow That Story, PoliticsThursday, Sep. 17 2009 @ 10:40AM Jared Polis. ​Representative Jared Polis has staged as many if not more healthcare town halls in recent weeks than any of his Colorado congressional colleagues. But the conservative CompleteColorado.com site questions his private investment in another healthcare-related enterprise: BridgeHealth International. The company's approach is typically shorthanded as "medical tourism," a term defined as "the notion of individuals traveling abroad for care and savings" amid a "What We Do" section of its website that goes on to suggest that BridgeHealth offers...

Company executives are forbidden from trading stocks using insider knowledge, but no such law exists to prevent members of Congress from doing so. Steve Henn reports. Kai Ryssdal: Insider trading is among the biggest of big-time no-no's. If you know something not everybody else does, you just aren't allowed to act on it. Corporate executives know there are laws against it. But there's nothing that says that lawmakers can't act on inside information they get just by doing their jobs. Marketplace's Steve Henn reports from Washington. STEVE HENN: A year ago this week Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman...

Last month there was much criticism over the fact that President Obama agreed to give Brazilian Owned Oil Company Petrobras up to $10 Billion Dollars to look for Oil off the Brazil Coast. This was especially disturbing when you consider that they Administration objects to the US Drilling off its own coast, which will work toward keeping the price of oil low and help wean us off foreign oil. Why would the POTUS pay for a foreign country to drill for oil but object to his own country taking advantage of his own country's resources? Payback. Last week Hot Air...

<p>Dell's release slipped out about three minutes before the market closed Thursday, giving the company's shares a boost of 98 cents, or 6.7%, to end at $15.65. The stock topped $16 ahead of Friday's opening bell.</p> <p>Really? You sure about that Marketwatch?</p>

Gee, was this just a "simple" short squeeze, or was AIG's surprise profit announcement this morning leaked? Hmmmm..... Not that it would be anything new, of course. We know from past experience that only rumors (or leaked facts!) that make stocks go down are ever investigated by the SEC, and then only when the persons doing the leaking (or rumoring) are not big broker/dealers and their crony hedge funds. This sort of nonsense is nothing new; it is in fact as old as the stock market. But the blatant level of inside baseball during this crisis (and now the rally)...

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation recently revoked contracts with BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase based on questions surrounding how the formal bidding process was run. How bad did Wall Street insiders suck up to Charles Millard after he arrived in Washington in May 2007, to run PBGC, the federal agency that oversees $50 billion in retirement funds? One Blackrock insider even gave him postive reviews on his church attendance. David Mullane wrote in an emal to him: Great job at Mass again this week. Here's NYT with more gory details: BlackRock, one of the world’s largest money-management firms, assigned...

A federal judge threw out the Securities and Exchange Commission's insider-trading charges against Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, and undercut the SEC's legal argument in a way that could make it more difficult to prosecute similar cases. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater in Dallas was vindication for Mr. Cuban, who maintained his innocence from the day the charges were filed in November. 'snip' Mr. Cuban and his lawyers denied that he was under any obligation not to trade on the information he received. Judge Fitzwater agreed, saying Mr. Cuban would be liable for insider trading only if...

BOSTON, MA—A hedge fund manager was sentenced late yesterday to a year and a day in federal prison for his role in an insider trading scheme. The sentencing came nearly three years after the man’s original sentencing hearing and followed a series of appeals that ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court. Acting United States Attorney Michael K. Loucks and Warren T. Bamford, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - Boston Field Division, announced today MICHAEL K.C. TOM, age 40, of Winchester, Massachusetts, was sentenced by the Honorable Nathaniel M. Gorton to 12 months and one...

In 2001, TV personality and business magnate Martha Stewart got a third-hand tip that one of her stocks was about to tank. She sold her shares to avoid $45,673 loss, pocket change for the fabulously wealthy entrepreneur. She later was accused of insider trading, but it turned out what she did was legal. But federal prosecutors, apparently channeling predecessors who put gangster Al Capone behind bars on innocuous income-tax charges when they couldn't get him on murder, bootlegging, bribery and many other crimes, managed to put Ms. Stewart in prison in 2004 on charges she broke the law in her...

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat and assistant majority leader, looked like such a great investor. On Sept. 19, he sold off $42,696 in mutual-fund shares, and quickly sold off another $73,000 during the rest of September. The stock market collapsed after that. Within two weeks, by Oct. 3, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by 9 percent. A month later, by Oct. 17, it had plummeted over 22 percent. On Tuesday this week, the average is still down about 25 percent from Sept. 19. If Mr. Durbin ever leaves his day job as a Democratic politician, he should...

If you knew what Sen. Durbin knew, would you do what he did? Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat and assistant majority leader, looked like such a great investor. On Sept. 19, he sold off $42,696 in mutual-fund shares, and quickly sold off another $73,000 during the rest of September. The stock market collapsed after that. Within two weeks, by Oct. 3, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by 9 percent. A month later, by Oct. 17, it had plummeted over 22 percent. On Tuesday this week, the average is still down about 25 percent from Sept. 19. If...

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democratic Party's Whip, unloaded more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual fund shares as the U.S. stock markets plunged last September. The Illinois lawmaker's 2008 financial disclosure statement reveals that he sold mutual fund shares worth more than $42,000 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders to come up with legislation to aid financially troubled banks. Also on Sept. 19, Durbin bought $43,562 worth of stock in Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Bloomberg News reported. By October 2, he had sold investments worth...

...Following the announcement (made late on the 23rd), Berkshire stock jumped in price the next day by 3.5%. The climb in price should not come as a surprise since Buffett is viewed as one of the greatest investors of all time. If he were to announce, in the middle of a panic, that he was buying into Goldman Sachs, his stock would most assuredly climb since it was Warren Buffett putting a stamp of approval on the stock market and financial system. Who better to then take a ride with then Buffett by buying his stock. If you knew this...

Link is to Sun Times, but source is Bloomberg; therefore, link only. http://www.suntimes.com/news/1620776,CST-NWS-durbin13.article

Still No Accountability (excerpted from: http://www.commoditynewscenter.com/blogs/When_Regulators_Need_Regulators) Over the past couple of days the plot has once again thickened, and guess who is back at the center of it all? Mary Shipiro and her agency, the SEC. Didn't hear about what happened? Neither did anyone else. On Friday a story hit the wire late in the day and that has gone largely unnoticed. Around 6pm EST, both the New York Times and Reuters covered what happened and the stories were similarly titled "SEC Lawyers Investigated for Insider Trading." In a nutshell the story goes like this... What is the reason that...

LEV L. DASSIN, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that former Ernst & Young, LLP, ("E&Y") partner JAMES GANSMAN was found guilty today, following a two-week jury trial, of six counts relating to insider trading based on confidential information he obtained from E&Y. As established by the evidence at trial before United States District Judge MIRIAM GOLDMAN CEDARBAUM: As a partner at E&Y, GANSMAN had access to confidential firm information about several merger and acquisition transactions involving E&Y clients. GANSMAN passed the inside information to another person—investment banker DONNA MURDOCH—who traded on the...

“Insider trading”… buying or selling securities based on knowledge that hasn’t been publicly disclosed is a felony. It’s prohibition is one of the basics of securities regulation and law. Imagine if you knew for a fact that a company’s earnings report was going to be better than expected- you could buy the stock before earnings were reported, and make a pile of cash after the good news was announced. You would also be cheating the rest of the public to whom the information had not been disclosed. Lots of you know my background on Wall Street; 2 decades as an...

Radical leftist George Soros has long been dedicated to destroying traditional values in America. The convicted insider trader and major funder of the Center for American Progress, whose president, John Podesta, is a co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, has now personally contributed $50,000 to the Obama Presidential Inaugural Committee, according to Accuracy in Media.

An unusual surge in Goldman Sachs' share price in the last 10 minutes of trading on Tuesday raised eyebrows on Wall Street, as it came two hours before news of Warren Buffett's big investment in the bank. Goldman Sachs shares rose more than $5 heading into the close of trading even as the rest of the market tumbled, leaving traders suspicious that inside information was used to make a profit. "Obviously someone knew the Buffett news that was coming out. I noticed it yesterday and I was telling my colleagues something is going on with Goldman," said Dave Rovelli, managing...

Martha Stuart went to jail for insider trading. More then 50 senators and representatives had stakes in AIG, Lehman, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns Cos. or IndyMac Bancorp Inc. I just did a search on insider trading and got no hits. Instead of worrying about troopergate, maybe the MSM should be investigating these 50 congressmen to see if any of them sold their stocks recently, like in the last 2 weeks.

PARIS (AFP) - The former German head of aircraft manufacturer Airbus, Gustav Humbert, was detained for questioning by France's financial crime unit Monday in connection with alleged insider trading at Airbus parent EADS, a source close to the matter said. The French financial market regulator, AMF, in April alleged in a report that Humbert sold 160,000 EADS shares in November 2005, earning 1.685 million euros (2.7 million dollars). He is suspected of having benefited from privileged information on EADS' financial prospects as well as delays to the Airbus A380 superjumbo project, which were announced in June 2006 and caused the...

FTW, December 6, 2001 -- On October 9th, FTW broke a story on insider trading connected to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center that sparked worldwide controversy. In that story we reported how the Israeli Herzliyya Institute for Counterterrorism had documented that unknown individuals -- with accurate foreknowledge of the attacks -- had purchased an obvious and unusually large number of "put" options on United and American Airlines shortly before the attacks. Additional companies hit hard by the insider trading included Axa Re(insurance) and Munich Re as well as American investment giants Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Put ...

Excerpt - Joe Nacchio, the aggressive chief executive who oversaw Qwest's spectacular growth as well as its near collapse into bankruptcy, was found guilty on 19 of 42 counts of illegal insider trading, a stellar finish for the Justice Department in its five- year probe of the company's former executives. As Judge Edward Nottingham read the guilty counts Thursday afternoon, Nacchio's eyes watered and his lips stayed firmly pressed together. With his hands crisscrossed on the defense table, he briefly glanced at the gallery and raised his eyebrows as if in disbelief. Earlier, as not-guilty pronouncements were read on the...

The political scandal that has engulfed Central Florida's toll-road agency, most powerful attorneys, biggest developers, best-known political activist, the Orlando Magic and a host of others started in an unlikely way: with a trespassing dog. When David Strong of Winter Park discovered that a neighbor's dog had done his business on Strong's lawn one too many times, he scooped up the evidence and, in a fit of anger, smeared it on the dog-owner's shirt and neck. Strong was charged with misdemeanor battery, took an anger-management class and performed community service, then forgot all about it. At least until he entered...

A former junior banker at Merrill Lynch yesterday confessed to of a brazen insider-trading scheme that also enlisted an exotic dancer, a retired Croatian seamstress, a New Jersey mailman and moles inside a BusinessWeek print shop..........the Trans-Atlantic stock fraud scam that racked up $6.7 million in ill-gotten gains....... Trading on tips from the young banker on six big mergers netted $6.4 million of the illicit profits, making it by far the most lucrative scheme concocted by the insider-trading ring's masterminds, Eugene Plotkin, 27, and David Pajcin, 29. The pair, who met while they both worked at Goldman Sachs, recruited Shpigelman...

One of the nation's most prominent hedge funds, Pequot Capital Management, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible insider trading, according to government officials briefed on the case.

George Soros failed in a bid to overturn an insider-trading conviction at France's highest appeals tribunal, but vowed to pursue an appeal....... The Court of Cassation, the tribunal of last resort in France, yesterday upheld a March 2005 judgment that Soros violated the law when he bought Societe Generale SA shares in 1988 with knowledge that the bank might be a takeover target. The Hungary-born financier....has been fighting the case for 17 years, will appeal......The verdict came as the 75-year-old former financier turned his attention from his investing career to political and charitable activities.

The highest court in France on Wednesday rejected a bid by George Soros, the billionaire investor, to overturn a conviction for insider trading in a case dating back nearly 20 years, leaving the first blemish on his five-decade investing career. The panel, the Cour de Cassation, upheld the conviction of Soros, 75, an American citizen, for buying and selling Société Générale shares in 1988 after receiving information about a planned corporate raid on the bank. Ron Soffer, his lawyer, said Soros planned to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the length of the proceedings...

Murakami Yoshiaki (that's my son's name, too...but no doubt the characters are different) faces a possible three years in prison and a fine of up to $30,000 - small change when you consider the billions he has made. Murakami is a corporate raider in a land where business is done by consensus. In the end, he admitted to inadvertently "breaking the law" by buying shares after he had "heard" that a company might be the target of a hostile takeover. Normally, this is called insider trading. But the Japanese also have a way of not saying things directly. It causes...

NEW YORK - Two Goldman Sachs employees made more than $6.7 million through insider trading by enlisting an analyst who provided information on Wall Street deals and a forklift driver who leaked copies of a market-moving magazine, authorities said Tuesday. Prosecutors called it one of the most extensive insider trading cases in decades, and it has no shortage of salacious details. The case includes allegations that the men tried to get strippers to coax stock tips from investment bankers who had inside knowledge of pending mergers and acquisitions. "We've never seen before a case involving so many different attempts to...

Two Democratic lawmakers have prepared legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their aides from trading stocks based on nonpublic information gathered on Capitol Hill. Rep. Louise Slaughter, the New York Democrat who wrote the bill, said: “Top leadership aides know what is happening before anyone else. The potential for abuse there is incredible.” 'Kudlow & Company' wants to know what you think. POLL

Just three days after starting his new job at Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., shock jock Howard Stern is now able to sell the roughly $200 million in Sirius stock that he received as part of his five-year deal with the company. Sirius' contract with Stern runs through 2010, but the company disclosed last week that it was giving Stern and his agent 34.4 million shares of stock right away because it had already reached certain undisclosed targets for subscriber growth under the deal it signed with Stern in late 2004. On Wednesday, the company made another regulatory filing saying that...

Toronto Globe & Mail Thursday, December 8, 2005 Page A4 Liberal leak led to insider trading, Harper suggests By CAMPBELL CLARK CHARLOTTETOWN -- Conservative Leader Stephen Harper suggested yesterday the Liberal government was involved in insider trading through leaks of an announcement of a new policy on income trusts that caused a stir of trading in the markets. The effort to capitalize on the issue came as the Conservative Leader's campaign moved into a second phase, aiming at smaller, specific slices of the electorate with targeted policy initiatives now that most of the high-profile announcements have been made. Yesterday, as...

General Motors Bars Senior Executives From Buying, Selling Company Stock Indefinitely DETROIT (AP) -- General Motors Corp. has forbidden senior executives and other employees with access to internal financial information from buying or selling company stock indefinitely, a spokeswoman for the automaker said Monday. GM spokeswoman Toni Simonetti said a memo was sent to senior executives May 24 barring them and some of their employees from buying or selling stock. Simonetti said she didn't know how many people were affected, but the company has about 400 senior executives. Simonetti said GM regularly has blackout periods when employees aren't supposed to...

Forbes ex-world’s richest man jailed in Japan AFP Posted online: Thursday, June 16, 2005 at 1252 hours IST TOKYO, JUNE 16: Former rail and real-estate magnate Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who was considered the world's richest man at the height of Japan's economic miracle in the late 1980s, pleaded guilty today to charges of insider trading in his fallen empire. "Facts are as stated," Tsutsumi, 71, told the Tokyo District Court during his first court hearing in the case that could land him in prison. "I feel seriously responsible as the man who led the Seibu Group. I am sorry," Tsutsumi, wearing...

"There is some evidence that plaintiffs and their attorneys are profitably short-selling the stock of the companies they intend to sue," writes Moin Yahya of the University of Alberta law faculty in a new paper called "The Legal Status of 'Dump & Sue'" (SSRN, Mar. 9). Strategic litigants or their attorneys thus stand to capture two distinct strands of revenue: one from the eventual settlement of the suit, the other from the profits they capture after their adversary's stock declines on the announcement of the suit. (Alternatively, some lawsuits might be rendered profitable by the gains from short-selling even though...

A French appeals court on Thursday confirmed a conviction of U.S. billionaire George Soros for insider trading and a 2.2 million euro ($2.87 million) fine. ADVERTISEMENT Hungarian-born Soros had appealed a French court’s 2002 decision which found him guilty of using insider information regarding a failed 1988 corporate raid on bank Societe Generale to make $2 million on the company’s stock. The financier turned philanthropist told the appeals court last month he did not believe he had done anything wrong. His lawyers said they would appeal Thursday’s decision. Societe Generale was privatised in 1987 and its stock rose the following...

FRENCH TOAST: George Soros lost the latest round of his 16-year battle with French regulators. Photo: Jim Alcorn Billionaire George Soros, the former investor and current philanthropist and political activist, failed yesterday to convince a French appeals court to overturn his 2002 conviction for insider trading. Soros, 74, is expected to take his conviction — related to the 1988 purchase and sale of shares in Societe Generale — to the equivalent of France's Supreme Court in an attempt to clear the sole blemish from his 40-year investment career. In 2002, a trial court in France found Soros used insider...

Corporate boards are shedding their sleepy images and becoming more ruthless when something is not quite right at the top. The result: Top U.S. executives are being knocked off their pedestals faster than ever. Boards are asking high-level company officers to hit the road for anything ranging from a financial scandal, lackluster results, improper insider trades or even an affair with another executive. In February, U.S. companies announced 103 CEO changes compared with 92 in January, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement and employment research firm. It was the fourth consecutive increase in monthly turnover and the first...

ATLANTA - ChoicePoint Inc., a leading data warehouser, says the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating stock sales by its top two executives and the embattled company has decided to stop giving personal information about consumers to small businesses. Its shares tumbled on the news. The dual announcements were made Friday by the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company in a news statement and a regulatory filing. The SEC probe involves sales of stock by chief executive Derek Smith and president Douglas Curling for a $16.6 million profit in the months after the company learned its massive database had been breached and before...

March 2, 2005 -- Investigators looking into insider-trading allegations in the blockbuster deal between Howard Stern and Sirius Radio are checking out reported boasts by the shock jock's limo driver that he profited from the deal, The Post has learned. The announcement last Oct. 5 that Stern would ditch Infinity Broadcasting for Sirius sent shares of the satellite broadcaster skyrocketing. The next day, Stern said on-air that his driver, Ronnie Mund — known on the show as "Ronnie the limo driver" — bragged in the studio about how he had bought Sirius stock cheap before his boss joined the company....

PARIS - Billionaire investor George Soros asked the Paris appeals court to overturn his conviction for insider trading on Thursday, telling a panel of three judges: "My reputation is at stake." Related Quotes DJIA NASDAQ S&P 500 10785.22 2058.62 1201.59 +30.96 -2.72 +0.84 Delayed Data Providers - Disclaimer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by: New Pro Platform The Hungarian-born financier was fined 2.2 million euros ($2.8 million at today's rates) in December 2002 — the amount he was accused of making from buying and selling shares of French bank Societe Generale with insider knowledge 17 years ago. Questioned by judge Jean-Baptiste Avel, Soros...