By Bernard Vaughan
NEW YORK, Feb 13 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Manhattan on
Wednesday sentenced former hedge fund manager Steven Fortuna,
who was among several informants in the government's broad
insider trading crackdown, to two years of probation for insider
trading.
Fortuna pleaded guilty in October 2009 to four counts of
securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud,
according to a sentencing memorandum that Manhattan U.S.
Attorney Preet Bharara filed on Feb. 4th.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein also ordered Fortuna, 50,
to forfeit $200,000.
A 1993 graduate of Columbia Business School, Fortuna worked
for years as a sell-side analyst of technology companies and in
2008 helped launch a hedge fund, S2 Capital LLC, according to
the sentencing memorandum.
In 2008, while probing the hedge fund Galleon Group,
investigators intercepted wiretapped calls between Fortuna and
other subjects of their investigation, according to the
sentencing memorandum. Fortuna obtained inside information about
technology companies including Akamai Inc and chip manufacturer
Advanced Micro Devices Inc, according to the sentencing
memorandum.
Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam, a central focus of the
government's investigation, is serving an 11-year prison term
following his conviction for securities fraud and conspiracy
charges in 2011.
Agents with the FBI approached Fortuna in 2009, and within
weeks he agreed to cooperate with their investigation. Fortuna
recorded more than 400 conversations for the FBI, prosecutors
said. They said his cooperation helped lead to the convictions
of Danielle Chiesi, a former portfolio manager with the hedge
fund New Castle Partners, and Robert Moffat, a former executive
with IBM.
Fortuna is the latest in a string of insider trading
informants to be sentenced. Most recently, Ali Far, a former
portfolio manager at Galleon, was sentenced to a year of
probation and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine.
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