Longest-Ever Insider Trading Sentence Handed To Perpetrator of $11M Longest-Running Scheme

by Beth Connolly on June 5, 2012

Insider trading cartoonThis is one record that you do not want. Former attorney Matthew Kluger was slaped with the longest ever prison sentence for insider trading: 12 years.

He and two associates (Garrett Bauer, 44, of New York, and New York mortgage broker Kenneth Robinson) are charged with conducting the longest-running insider trading scheme ever uncovered by authorities.

The group made $11 million on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

“At the end of the day, the judge agreed that these were extraordinarily serious crimes that betray people’s trust in the stock market and were motivated purely by greed,” said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman. Ouch.

The judge called the group “amoral” and “thuggish,” comparing them to drug dealers in their propensity for clandestinely exchanging bags of cash and dropping drug store cellphones in the garbage. Bauer even contemplated burning $175,000 in cash to remove his fingerprints from it.

Kluger is appealing the sentence. He compared his guilty plea to Raj Rajaratnam’s denial of wrongdoing, complaining that Rajaratnam got off with a lighter sentence. “I guess it’s better to take $68 million and go to trial and be unwilling to accept responsibility for what you did,” he said.

Meanwhile, Garrett Bauer has been attempting to scare youngsters away from following in his footsteps, speaking at different universities about his crimes.

Lawyer gets longest-ever insider trading sentence for 17-year scheme; trader gets 9 years

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Beth Connolly is Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Job Report and the Compliance Exchange. She blogs creatively at When Nutmeg Met Basil. Connect with her on LinkedIn , Twitter, and About.Me.

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