14 more snared for insider trading
NEW YORK — Two attorneys 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 shown white-collar suspects to be using the coverup 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.
At the time, U. S. Attorney Preet Bharara called the first arrests “a wake-up call for Wall Street.”
“Today the alarm bells have only grown louder,” he said at a news conference Thursday.
Bharara said the defendants borrowed a “page from the drug dealer’s playbook” by using anonymous hard-to- trace prepaid cell phones to dodge detection by law enforcement. He said they also discussed falsifying company files to make it appear trades weren’t based on secrets.
“When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such,” he said.
Two tactics prosecutors routinely use in drug cases—confidential informants and court-authorized wiretaps of phones — were used in the insider trading probe on a scale wider than ever before.
The complaints also described FBI agents trailing suspects as they do in drug cases to spot them passing money between one another. Court papers said agents observed cash appearing to be delivered in “an item that appeared to be approximately the size of a VHS tape.”
Bharara said total profits alleged by prosecutors was $40 million while the Securities and Exchange Commission raised the total to $53 million.
Bharara said eight people were arrested Thursday on securities fraud charges and another five have already pleaded guilty and are cooperating. Another person is still at large, he said.
At a bail hearing for Rajaratnam on Thursday, defense attorney John Dowd criticized the government’s case, saying it was “not as overwhelming as the government would like to believe.”
Rajaratnam has denied participating in the scheme to use inside information to trade stocks at a profit ahead of public announcements.
The complaint said the government broke the case with the help of a confidential informant and three court-authorized wiretaps.
The informant, who executed trades based on insider information while working at a hedge fund, has cooperated with the FBI since July 2007 and has agreed to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and securities fraud in the hopes of getting leniency, the complaint said.
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