The Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced civil and criminal insider trading charges against Jun Ying, who allegedly used confidential information entrusted to him by the company to conclude that Equifax had suffered a serious breach. The SEC alleges that before Equifax’s public disclosure of the data breach, Ying exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and then sold the shares, reaping proceeds of nearly $1 million. According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses. Despite the breach, shares of Equifax have risen by 4.7% so far in 2018, compared with a gain of 0.9% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and a rise of 3.4% for the S&P 500 index over the same period, according to FactSet data.
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