The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that two brothers in Brazil have agreed to pay nearly $5 million to settle charges that they were behind suspicious trading in call options for H.J. Heinz Company the day before the company publicly announced its acquisition.
The SEC filed an emergency enforcement action earlier this year to freeze assets in a Swiss-based trading account used to reap more than $1.8 million from trading in advance of the Heinz announcement. The SEC’s immediate move the day after the announcement ensured the illicit profits could not be released out of the account while the investigation into the then-unknown traders continued.
In an amended complaint filed today in federal court in Manhattan, the SEC alleges that the order to purchase the Heinz options was placed by Rodrigo Terpins while he was vacationing at Walt Disney World in Orlando, and the trading was based on material non-public information that he received from his brother Michel Terpins. The trades were made through an account belonging to a Cayman Islands-based entity named Alpine Swift that holds assets for one of their family members. Rodrigo Terpins purchased nearly $90,000 in option positions in Heinz the day before the announcement, and those positions increased dramatically by nearly 2,000 percent the next day.
The Terpins brothers and Alpine Swift, which has been named as a relief defendant for the purposes of recovering ill-gotten gains, have agreed to disgorge the entire $1,809,857 in illegal profits made from trading Heinz options. The Terpins brothers also will pay $3 million in penalties. The settlement is subject to court approval.
For more detail, visit SEC.gov | Previously Unknown Insider Traders in Heinz Agree to $5 Million Settlement
