The government's case in what it is calling the largest insider trading case involving a U.S. hedge fund contains a detailed list of trades involving household-name companies.
Investigators have pieced together a case that alleges more than $25 million in illegal gains based on trading in 2006-09 on companies including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Fortune 500), Akamai (AKAM), Clearwire (CLWR), Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Hilton, Polycom (PLCM) and Sun Microsystems (JAVA, Fortune 500), among others.
The six people charged include hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon Group; Robert Moffat, IBM's (IBM, Fortune 500) top hardware executive and an oft-discussed CEO candidate; Mark Curland and Danielle Chiesi, executives of the hedge fund New Castle Partners; Anil Kumar, a director at consulting firm McKinsey & Co.; and Rajiv Goel, an executive in Intel's treasury department.
Just what did they allegedly do? Using information gleaned from wiretapped conversations between the accused and others, along with the statements of an apparent informant, SEC investigators have pieced together a series of episodes alleging to show how the defendants used inside information and well-timed trades to turn million-dollar profits.
Those charged have yet to enter pleas in the case. Jim Waldman, a lawyer for Rajaratman, told the Wall Street Journal that the hedge fund chief "is innocent. We're going to fight the charges." Lawyers for some of the other accused said their clients are shocked by the charges and deny wrongdoing.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/19/mark...ion=2009101912