James Fleishman, a salesperson for Primary Global Research (PGR), was convicted of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, while Winifred Jiau, an expert affiliated with PGR, received a sentence of 4 years in prison. Of the 16 people affiliated with PGR indicted in insider trading cases 15 have pleaded guilty or been convicted. The sole remaining individual is Stanley Ng, an employee in the finance department of Marvell Technology Group Ltd., who was arrested in August and accused of passing Marvell earnings and profit information to Winifred Jiau.
The jury in Fleishman’s trial took 6 hours to return guilty verdicts on charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud (passing material non-public information) and conspiracy to commit wire fraud (passing confidential information). His sentencing is scheduled for December.
The judge who presided over the Fleishman trial, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, was also the judge in Jiau’s trial. In a separate action, he denied prosecutors’ request that Jiau serve as long as 10 years in prison. Rakoff criticized federal sentencing guidelines for their “arithmetic certainty” and rejected the 78 to 97 months the guidelines suggested in favor of a 4 year term. This is the longest sentence of any PGR-related case so far, exceeding the 2.5 years that Rakoff gave Donald Longueiul in July. Unlike Jiau, Longueiul, a former SAC portfolio manager who profited from inside information supplied by Jiau, pleaded guilty. Rakoff allowed Don Ching Trang Chu, the Taiwan liaison for PGR, to escape prison with probation, and permitted Chu to return to his native Taiwan. Chu had been a cooperating witness for prosecutors.