Roger Fingas
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Apple's former director of corporate law, Gene Levoff, with insider trading based on his knowledge of corporate performance.
Levoff "traded on material nonpublic information about Apple's earnings three times during 2015 and 2016," the SEC said in a lawsuit filed through the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, reported by CNBC. "For the trading in 2015 and 2016, Levoff profited and avoided losses of approximately $382,000."
The executive is also accused of three additional incidents in 2011 and 2012.
Levoff took advantage of unreleased quarterly earnings data as well as internal updates on iPhone sales, the SEC explained, even violating the company's own "blackout" windows for stock transactions. He allegedly bought shares in time to profit from post-results spikes, or sold in advance if he knew numbers would disappoint investors. An irony is that Levoff was responsible for Apple's compliance with SEC rules.
The executive's history further includes helping to establish Apple Vietnam in 2015. At the time, he was also the director of Apple Operations International.
Update: Levoff's leave of absence was forced by Apple, after the company was told that the attorney was involved in insider trading.
"After being contacted by authorities last summer we conducted a thorough investigation with the help of outside legal experts," Apple told AppleInsider in a statement. "This resulted in termination."
Apple forced Levoff to go on leave in July 2018, and ultimately fired him in September.
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20 Comments
Did Apple execs know and hence firing or was there another reason?
Yeah... kind of awkward to have a cheat in charge of rule compliance.
Glad Apple did the right thing by giving him the boot.
You've got to hope the head of HR, Sorry, 'people', did everything right here.... Would be awkward timing for her if not..
Let see, he bought stock in the run up to earning and sold before the number came out which were neither good or bad, and he made a profit doing exactly what anyone else who follows apple has done. Gee I been doing similar things for the last 20 yrs on Apple so am I using inside information. I would like to see what information he specifically had that made a difference during this time periods. Now if they told me he sold at the end of Dec 2019 right before the earnings update that tanked the stock then I would say that was insider information.
Keep in mind he was making the trades when the market was predicting FUD on Apple. He knew the number were good, but he could not predict how much FUD the market was going to throw out.
I suspect what matter was he was trading during the blackout period that no exec is allow to do no matter how well or not so well a company is doing. These rules were designed to keep insiders from bailing right before bad news hit the market, not when good news is coming out and the stock is going up, but that is bad now too.