A former lawyer for the manufacturer is accused of having diverted confidential information which allowed him to pocket several hundred thousand dollars.
The rules imposed on listed companies are very strict and the SEC, the policeman of the American Stock Exchange, intends to enforce them to the letter.
The lawyer in charge of enforcing the rules of the Stock Exchange was using Apple’s financial data for his benefit
In 2019, the US market regulator filed a lawsuit against Gene Levoff, an Apple attorney, for insider trading.
The facts would have taken place between February 2011 and April 2016. Gene Levoff is accused during this period of having taken advantage of information not yet made public on the accounts of the Californian manufacturer to carry out transactions and pocket nice sums of money.
Gene Levoff was not just a simple lawyer. He was part of Apple’s Disclosure Committee, responsible for verifying information and documents filed with the SEC before the presentation of quarterly results, but also for enforcing SEC rules, including quarterly blackout periods in order to avoid insider trading.
The judgment will be known next November and is likely to be heavy
Gene Levoff thus had a perfect knowledge of the manufacturer’s financial information and could anticipate the rises and falls of the Apple share according to the next announced results and the performance of the company, by buying or selling large volumes of shares. a few days before the publication of the group’s quarterly figures.
By using this data, the lawyer would have made a profit of $227,000 on certain transactions and would have managed to avoid losses of approximately $377,000 on other exchanges by anticipating downward variations in the share price of his employer.
Apple immediately fired its former attorney in 2018, but Gene Levoff’s legal troubles continue to this day. His judgment is expected for November 10: the sentence he faces is 20 years in prison and a fine of five million dollars for each of the counts for which he is being prosecuted.
After denying the facts for several years, Gene Levoff finally pleaded guilty recently, perhaps hoping for a little leniency from the courts. Apple meanwhile declined to comment on this.
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Source : The Verge
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