The New York attorney general’s office has filed suit against the former CEO of Emergent Biosolutions Inc., alleging insider trading, while at the same time announcing a settlement with the company, which agreed to pay $900,000 in penalties for approving the illegal trading plan. The lawsuit stems from reports of vaccine contamination at the company’s manufacturing plant during the height of the COVID pandemic.
Six individuals, including an investment banker, face multiple U.S. charges stemming from an alleged $41 million insider-trading scheme, plus stock manipulation schemes involving biopharma companies. The charges are related to three overlapping securities fraud schemes that occurred between June 2020 and February 2024.
A former board member of Chinook Therapeutics Inc. and four others were charged May 22 in a 19-count indictment stemming from an alleged insider trading scheme that produced more than $600,000 in profits after the June 2023 announcement that Novartis AG was acquiring the Seattle-based Chinook in a $3.5 billion deal.
George Demos, former vice president of drug safety and pharmacovigilance at Acadia Pharmaceuticals Inc., is the latest biopharma executive to plead guilty to insider trading charges.
A former regional sales director at Lantheus Holdings Inc. is the latest biopharma official to settle insider trading charges with the U.S. SEC. As part of the settlement, John Heropoulos agreed to disgorge nearly $61,000, an equal amount in civil penalties and more than $10,000 in prejudgment interest, according to the SEC.
Rounding out a year of insider trading charges involving biopharma companies, the U.S. SEC reported Dec. 30 that it had filed a complaint against two top Humanigen Inc. executives, Cameron Durrant, CEO, and Dale Chappell, chief science officer,
for trades based on insider knowledge of FDA actions.
A principal investigator and a former biopharma executive are the latest to reach settlements with the SEC to resolve charges of insider trading involving drug companies. Sai-Hong Ignatius Ou, of the University of California Irvine, agreed to a judgment ordering him to disgorge more than $1.5 million and to pay a civil penalty of the same amount. In a separate, unrelated settlement, Curt Dewitz, a former executive of an undisclosed biopharma company, agreed to disgorge about $70,383 in unlawful profits.
The U.S. SEC filed insider trading charges against Ruimin Xie, the former director of analytical development at Bellus Health Inc., for allegedly receiving ill-gotten gains of $59,408.42 by acting on word of a potential acquisition by GSK plc.
Insider trading isn’t always about profits. Sometimes it’s avoiding losses. That’s the basis of the U.S. SEC’s complaint against Matthew Groom, an information technology consultant to Spero Therapeutics Inc. Groom agreed Sept. 15 to a $28,000 settlement to resolve the complaint stemming from a trade of Spero shares that enabled him to avoid $13,000 in losses when news of the company’s downsizing and issues with its lead product became public two years ago.
The U.S. SEC settled charges against Philip Markin, a fifth person charged in connection with an insider trading scheme involving the February 2021 $1.85 billion offer by Merck & Co. Inc. to acquire Pandion Therapeutics Inc.
