As the Corporation descends on campus — and the Occupy movement prepares to protest its arrival — one of its trustees is finding himself under renewed legal scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that SAC Capital Advisors, founded by billionaire Trustee Steven Cohen P'08, is again under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading.
The investigation is aimed at the fund's trading patterns before Johnson & Johnson's 2009 acquisition of Cougar Biotechnology. According to the Wall Street Journal, the firm increased its position in Cougar Biotechnology by about 8,000 percent in a three-month span between the end of 2008 to March 2009, two months before the acquisition was publicly announced.
The Wall Street Journal reported a separate SEC probe into Cohen's fund in June regarding possible insider trading before the 2007 acquisition of MedImmune by AstraZeneca. As of yet, no charges have arisen from that investigation.
The Justice Department is also currently conducting a criminal investigation of SAC activity overseen by Cohen personally.
Cohen was elected to the Corporation, the University's highest governing body, in 2008. A gallery in the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts bears his name.
Representatives from SAC and the SEC were unavailable for comment late Thursday.
