Former Apple Corporate Legal Director Levoff Fined 1.15 Million US Dollars for Insider Trading

TapTechNews July 3rd news. According to Reuters, Gene Levoff, the former corporate legal director of Apple, was fined 1.15 million US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 8.383 million yuan) by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading. At the end of last year, Levoff was sentenced to four years' probation and a fine, avoiding a potential two-year prison term.

The fine amount was not determined at that time, but the judge made a ruling this Tuesday. The judge said that although Levoff's life is not extravagant, his behavior is particularly egregious.

Levoff was responsible for supervising whether employees comply with the company's insider trading policy at Apple, which is why the judge considered his violation particularly serious.

Because Levoff's responsibility is to prevent insiders from trading, he can obtain Apple's earnings data in advance, which he knows before it is made public to the public. He used this information to buy stocks when the company's performance is better than expected and sell stocks when the performance is lower than expected. Through these illegal trades, Levoff made a profit of about 277,000 US dollars and avoided a loss of about 377,000 US dollars.

For example, in July 2015, Levoff knew that Apple's iPhone sales in the third quarter would be lower than analysts' expectations, so he sold Apple stocks worth 10 million US dollars from July 17th to 21st (that is, when the Apple earnings information was announced). After the announcement, Apple's stock price fell by more than 4%.

Levoff served at Apple from 2011 to 2018, and his abuse of insider information occurred from 2011 to 2016. In September 2018, after the authorities contacted Apple, Levoff was fired. In June 2022, Levoff pleaded guilty to six securities fraud charges related to insider trading. Federal prosecutors requested to sentence Levoff to prison to deter other corporate executives from insider trading, but the judge believed that Levoff was fired and could no longer practice law, so there is no need to sentence him to prison.