UBS Banker Exits After Husband Fined for Insider Trading
UBS Banker Exits After Husband Fined for Insider Trading
(Bloomberg) -- UBS Group AG investment banker Annie Wang left the firm after U.S. regulators punished her husband last month for allegedly trading on information he gleaned by eavesdropping on her calls, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Wang wasn’t accused of wrongdoing when the Securities and Exchange Commission fined her husband, Peter Cho. And at the time, UBS said it had conducted its own review and agreed with the regulator, “that our employee was not involved in the alleged trading activity.” A company spokeswoman declined to discuss Wang’s employment on Wednesday.
Cho agreed to pay almost $533,000 in fines, ill-gotten gains and interest when he settled the SEC lawsuit last month without admitting or denying wrongdoing. The agency accused him of trading on information he overheard or saw while his then-fiancee was conducting calls and handling documents for Alaska Air Group Inc.’s takeover of Virgin America Inc. She had been advising Alaska Air for months before the carrier announced the deal in April 2016.
While the SEC didn’t identify Wang by name, a person familiar with the matter said last month that she’s the banker described in the regulator’s complaint.
“The investigation showed that Annie Wang did nothing wrong and is a completely innocent party here,” Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer representing Wang and Cho, said in an emailed statement. “Because she is innocent, we took pains to ensure that her identity would not be made public and protect her from any negative treatment. It is unfortunate that, despite these efforts, someone decided to leak her name anyway.”
--With assistance from Matt Robinson.
To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Bartenstein in New York at bbartenstei3@bloomberg.net;Sonali Basak in New York at sbasak7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, ;Rita Nazareth at rnazareth@bloomberg.net, David Scheer, Dan Reichl
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