2 Ordered to Pay in Insider Trading Case : Ex-Broker Officials to Forfeit $3.5 Million; Levine Case Widens

Two former officials at leading Wall Street brokerage houses agreed to forfeit more than $3.5 million today after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused them of joining investment banker Dennis B. Levine in a massive insider-trading scheme.

Robert M. Wilkis, until last month a 37-year-old first vice president at E. F. Hutton, and Ira B. Sokolow, 32, a vice president at Shearson Lehman American Express, neither admitted nor denied any wrongdoing as they signed consent orders to settle civil charges filed by the commission. But Wilkis agreed to give up $3.3 million and Sokolow, who was fired by Shearson Lehman today, promised to repay $210,000.

Entered Guilty Plea

Levine, who was a managing director at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., pleaded guilty to criminal charges last month and agreed to cooperate with investigators. The SEC had accused him of making more than $12 million in a five-year period by trading on confidential information he acquired in the course of his work.

Wilkis, who received an undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1973 and a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford in 1976, began his illegal trading in 1978--years before Levine is alleged to have done anything wrong--the SEC charged.

But in the early 1980s, the commission said, Levine and Wilkis agreed to help each other by exchanging confidential information about planned mergers and other deals that held potential for big stock market profits.

Supplied Information

Sokolow, who holds a degree from the Wharton School of Business and an MBA from Harvard, furnished Levine with similar secret information in return for a share of the profits Levine made by trading on it, the SEC said.