Lawyer in Mergers Firm Charged With Insider Trading Pocketing $32 Million

A lawyer who worked at three major merger and acquisition law firms has been arrested and charged with stealing andĀŒ passing insider information on upcoming deals to a stock trader who bought and sold on the info, earning the duo over $32 million in the past five years. Attorney Matthew Kluger, 50ĀŒ and trader Garrett Bauer, 43 worked out a scheme where Kruger stole the iformation when he was a corporate associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore and late at Skadden Arps. In 2005 aoccrding to the complaint, Kruger began working at Wilson Sonsini and took information from the firm’s computer system and provided that information to Bauer through an intermediary allowing Bauer to buy shares of stock and sell them when the deal became public. in 2009, Kluger, who graduated NYU law school in 1987, went into Wilson Sonsi’s computer system to get information about Oracle Corporations bid for Sun Microsystems. Bauer bought more than 4 million shares of Sun stock and earned in excess of $11 million. As time went on and the pair thought that authorities might be catching up with them, they started to destroy evidence including cell phones and computers. Bauer apparently told the coconspirator who fed him the info from Kluger, to burn $175,000 in cash because he feared his finger prints would be found on the money. The government is ramping up on finding and prosecuting insider traders. A trial in one major case is ongoing in a New York Federal Courthouse against Raj Rajaratnam, who, the government says earned a cool $63.8 million from insider trading. He was the founder of the Galleon hedge fund. The case was built on government wiretaps.