Goldman, Merrill Employees Charged With Insider Trading

A Merrill Lynch investment banking analyst, a fixed-income research associate at Goldman Sachs, and a third man were arrested yesterday in an insider trading case involving information from a Business Week column that has been at the center of other such cases.The column, called Inside Wall Street, is written by Gene Marcial. There have been at least three other known cases of brokers and individual investors trying to profit from learning what stocks are mentioned in it.Yesterday, a Merrill analyst, Stanislav Shpigelman; an associate in Goldman’s Fixed Income Research Division, Eugene Plotkin, and a third man, Juan Renteria, were charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit insider trading, and six counts of securities fraud, according to documents released yesterday.Prosecutors say the trading resulted in $6.7 million in illegal gains.[“Those who are tempted to trade on greed should realize we are here. We are watching,” U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said yesterday, Dow Jones Newswires reported.According to court documents, prosecutors have alleged that Messrs. Shpigelman, Plotkin, and Renteria engaged in two separate insider-trading schemes – one that involved six pending mergers being handled by Merrill Lynch and one that revolved around trading in 20 stocks based on prepublication copies of the Business Week column.The government claims in a complaint unsealed yesterday that Mr. Plotkin and a former Goldman Sachs analyst, David Pajcin, orchestrated the two arrangement. Mr. Pajcin, 29 years old, has been charged with conspiracy and insider trading in connection with the BusinessWeek trades. He is cooperating with the government, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said yesterday.Mr. Garcia, the U.S. Attorney, said Mr. Plotkin and Mr. Pajcin pooled their resources to essentially create an “insider trading business.”“For a little while, it worked,” Mr. Garcia said.]The assistant director of the North east regional office of the Securities and Exchange Commission, David Markowitz, said it was tipped off in August to trades related to a pending acquisition of Reebok by Adidas, a deal that Merrill Lynch was working on at the time.Also yesterday, the SEC added five people – including Messrs. Plotkin, Shpigelman, and Renteria – to a separate civil case over insider trading of Reebok shares. Thirteen people have been charged in that case so far, including Plotkin’s father.Yesterday, Mr. Markowitz called the fraud case “a rare example of premeditated insider trading.” He said the men who were charged were part of a ring that recruited employees at legitimate businesses to work for weekly stipends. “That’s another disturbing aspect of this case,” he said. Mr. Renteria was specifically hired to work at a Wisconsin printing plant where BusinessWeek is published in order to obtain the column in advance, Mr. Markowitz said.A spokeswoman for BusinessWeek, Mary Skafidas, said that the magazine takes measures to safeguard the information published in Inside Wall Street. There are strict security procedures in place at the plant, Ms. Skafidas said, and adherence is scrutinized on an annual basis and as part of on-site inspections.Additional measures are in place for Mr. Marcial’s column in particular because it contains “market moving information,” Ms. Skafidas said. Mr. Marcial’s column is handled by a limited number of editors and employees at the printing plant, Ms. Skafidas said.This is not the first time the column by Mr. Marcial has been targeted in an insider trading case. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged two stock traders and two printing plant employees with insider trading based on information they read in advance copies of the magazine between 1997 and 1999.In 2002 another man pleaded guilty to bribing a postal worker to break into bundles of BusinessWeek to read Mr. Marcial’s column. And ten years earlier the commission charged a former Merrill Lynch broker, his mother, and three others for securing advance copies of the magazine to trade stocks.Mr. Plotkin, who has worked at Goldman since 2004, had previously told the firm he would be leaving in June. He was placed on leave yesterday.Mr. Shpigelman was placed on administrative leave following his arrest.

Goldman, Merrill Employees Charged With Insider Trading

Goldman, Merrill Employees Charged With Insider Trading

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