SAC Capital Pleads Guilty to Decade-Long Insider Trading Conspiracy
ANTOINE GARA, 04 November 2013
Steven A. Cohen’s hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors agreed to plead guilty to federal charges that it violated insider trading laws and will pay a record $1.8 billion in fines and restitution.
In July, a grand jury indicted SAC Capital and its affiliates for one count of wire fraud and four counts of securities fraud, in an insider trading conspiracy U.S. prosecutors alleged lasted over a decade and led to hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits and avoided losses.
The hedge fund’s alleged insider trading occurred between 1999 and at least 2010, according to the complaint, which was filed on July 25 by Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The U.S. attorney also levied civil money laundering charges against the fund in July.
“Greed sometimes is not good,” Bharara said at a Monday press conference, referencing Wall Street, the 1987 classic that addressed a rash of insider trading in the first years of the leveraged buyout boom. When charging SAC Capital in July, Bharara said the hedge fund had become “a veritable magnet for market cheaters.”
