The SEC recently charged a former employee of a biopharmaceutical company with insider trading in advance of an acquisition but with a unique twist: Trading the securities of a company unrelated to the merger. The employee, Matthew Panuwat, did not trade his own company’s or the acquiring company’s securities, but instead purchased stock options for shares of a competitor not involved in the acquisition, in the belief (as alleged by the SEC) that the competitor’s stock price would also benefit from the news. The SEC did not allege that Panuwat had any particular information received from the company whose stock he had traded, but that he had engaged in what has been referred to as “shadow trading” of a comparable company by misappropriating information from his employer.
