Indian-Americans charged with insider trading

New York, December 23

An Indian-American attorney and his wife have been charged in the US with insider trading after they used confidential information obtained from a corporate client about a pharmaceutical company and avoided thousands of dollars in losses.

California-based Shivbir Grewal and Preetinder Grewal agreed to pay $ 90,000 to settle the federal regulator US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges, and Shivbir also agreed to be suspended from practicing as an attorney before the SEC on behalf of any publicly traded company or other entity regulated by the agency.

“An attorney owes a client a duty of trust when presented with confidential information,” said Michele Wein Layne, Director of the SEC’s Los Angeles Regional Office.

“Shivbir attempted to avoid personal financial losses by breaching his duty to protect that nonpublic information, and in the end he pays a heavier price for exploiting it”, he said. — PTI