Matthew Kluger, former attorney was sentenced to 12 years in prison, the longest sentence ever handed out for the crime of insider trading. He pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges admitting to sharing confidential information about his firms’ corporate clients for more than a decade.
Not since Rudolph Giuliani brought down Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky has the world seen an insider trading scandal this big. Not even 22 years later, with hedge fund tycoons among the most powerful players in global finance. The scale of this type of fraud has only gotten exponentially larger through the likes also of Raj Rajaratnam.
Kluger’s scheme was carried out from 1994 to 2011, 17 years and is believed to be the longest ever uncovered by law enforcement, though the crimes charged dated only to 2005. Kluger was the mastermind who conspired and schemed along with two other accomplices’ former trader Garrett Bauer. As well as a third man, New York mortgage broker Kenneth Robinson, who acted as the middleman.
Robinson was arrested in 2011 and secretly recorded conversations with the other men. Including one in which Bauer discussed lighting $175,000 on fire to erase his fingerprints, according to court documents.
Kluger admitted passing advance information on company mergers to Robinson, who would give it to Bauer. The trio was estimated to have made $11 million on tech company Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
It was said that every one of more than 30 insider trades made by Bauer was based on information provided by Kluger, whom was characterised as “amoral” and “thuggish.” The trio were compared to “drug dealers” for the way they used throwaway cellphones and multiple ATM accounts to withdraw cash and exchange it in envelopes or bags.