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The FTC files a lawsuit to stop the largest supermarket merger in US history. Regulators moved to block Kroger’s $25 billion bid for Albertsons, warning that the deal would raise prices and harm union workers’ bargaining power.
insider trading from home
The husband of a former BP mergers and acquisitions manager who pleaded guilty this month to eavesdropping on her phone calls and then illegally earning $1.76 million by using what he learned, exploiting remote work to obtain confidential information Are not alone in doing so. For example, there’s the Chief Compliance Officer (yes, even the Chief Compliance Officer!) who is accused of trading information stolen from his girlfriend’s laptop. (He pleaded guilty under a cooperation agreement with the Justice Department.) Or the husband who, when his wife went to work while on a family vacation, heard that his company would miss earnings expectations and was After time he was accused of insider trading. (He agreed to pay more than $300,000 to the SEC to settle the allegations, without admitting or denying the allegations.)
This isn’t a new problem, but the post-Covid era of remote work has made it more prevalent. And companies are not ready. “Many employers have fairly stringent data security,” said Laura Sack, partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. “Less attention is being paid to less sophisticated methods of breaching privacy, such as eavesdropping.”
Taking exception to privacy with family is a common but risky approach. “Do I think this happens every day? Yes,” said Robert Hinckley Jr., a shareholder in Buchalter’s Denver office. “As a lawyer, do you do this? No.” Sacks cites a hypothetical worst-case scenario: You share confidential information with your spouse, and then when you break up, that person tries to use it against you. Morris Manning & Martin Partner Eleanor Stone says she sometimes tells her clients about the former head of a prep school who was awarded an $80,000 discrimination settlement—which the school later rescinded after her daughter posted a Had refused to pay citing confidentiality agreement. Read more about it on Facebook.
Can confidential conversations take place even while working from home? Stone, who often works on sensitive personnel issues, says that if she knows someone else can hear her, even at home, she will send a message to the person she is talking to. and will create code words for the conversation – for example, “When I say Bob, I mean Brian, and when I talk about back surgery, I’m talking about Brian’s heart condition.” Sack said that during the pandemic, her husband called their parked car his “mobile office” because it was often the only place she could guarantee she wouldn’t be within earshot of anyone else.
