[ad_1]
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Gene Daniel Levoff, senior director of corporate law at Apple until September 2018. He is accused of using his position to carry out illegal transactions on the Internet. Apple shares.
Levoff was part of Apple's Disclosure Committee, one of the people who can review the company's quarterly financial reports before they are released. The SEC claims that it used nonpublic information obtained through this committee to inform transactions made on Apple stock. For example, in July 2015, he learned that Apple was going to miss badysts' estimates of iPhone unit sales. Between July 17 and July 21, when Apple released its quarterly earnings report, it sold nearly all of its Apple shares, totaling nearly $ 10 million. When the news became public, Apple 's stock price fell by more than 4%, which prevented expected losses of about 345,000 USD.
The SEC claims that between 2011 and 2012, Levoff would have made a profit of 245,000 USD and would have avoided in 2015 and 2016 losses amounting to 382,000 USD.
Apple fired Levoff last year after conducting an internal investigation in response to a call from the authorities. During his career at Apple, he was one of the people responsible for ensuring that employees follow the company's policy on insider trading. In 2015, he even put in place an update of the policy. The SEC filing states that Levoff sent an e-mail three times to his employees to warn them that the company was entering a blackout period and that they were prohibited from trading Apple's stock. Two of these emails were "immediately before" his 2011 insider transactions.
One of these emails included the following capitalized reminder:
REMEMBER, IS NOT AUTHORIZED, WHETHER OR NOT IN A NEGOTIABLE WINDOW, IF YOU POSSESS OR HAVE ACCESS TO IMPORTANT INFORMATION THAT HAS NOT BEEN PUBLISHED PUBLICALLY
The SEC is asking Levoff to pay an amount equal to the profits made and the losses avoided over the last five years, with a penalty three times higher. The agency also demands that he be banned from his position as director or director of a public company. Meanwhile, the US Attorney in Newark, New Jersey, has filed criminal charges punishable by up to 20 years in prison and $ 5 million.
Source link
