Merrill Lynch Executive Charged in Insider Trading
A London-based executive of Merrill Lynch was charged today with masterminding a massive illegal share-trading scheme on Wall Street.
Nahum Vaskevitch, managing director of the mergers and acquisitions department of the brokerage’s London office, was charged in a civil complaint filed in federal court by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC charged that Vaskevitch leaked insider, or non-public, information about 12 companies that were involved in mergers or acquisitions.
The leaks, it said, resulted in more than $4 million in profit for himself and others involved in the scheme.
The complaint is the latest to be filed in a yearlong insider-trading scandal that has rocked Wall Street. The biggest case so far involved corporate raider Ivan Boesky.
Court papers said one of the deals involving Vaskevitch was the 1984 merger of K mart stores with Pay Less Drug Stores, Northwest. Another was the sale by W. R. Grace & Co. of its holdings in Herman’s sporting goods company.
The complaint was filed in New York because the alleged illegal trading occurred here.
In addition to Vaskevitch, who is a dual British and Israeli citizen living in London, others named as defendants in the complaint were David Sofer, an Israeli citizen living in Jerusalem, and two corporations, Plenmeer Ltd., a British company, and Meda Establishment, a Liechtenstein corporation.
The SEC won a court order freezing all the assets of the defendants in the United States. A hearing was scheduled for March 20.
The scheme, which covered a two-year period, allegedly involved Vaskevitch leaking information to Sofer about looming takeovers and mergers, some of which he worked on, according to the complaint.
According to court papers, Vaskevitch joined Merrill Lynch in London in 1981. Plenmeer is a British company with trading accounts with two brokerage houses, and Meda is an investment company.
Sofer is a principal in both Plenmeer and Meda, and Vaskevitch has an interest in Plenmeer, according to the papers.
