SEC Director of Enforcement Robert Khuzami said today that the agency will focus on derivatives as part of its crackdown on insider trading by hedge funds. Bloomberg reports that according to Khuzami, “the days of insider-trading scrutiny being focused almost solely on the equity markets are now gone” and the SEC will “roll back the curtain on those markets and look at patterns across all markets.”
As previously discussed here, in May 2009 the SEC charged Renato Negrin, a former portfolio manager at hedge fund investment adviser Millennium Partners L.P., and Jon-Paul Rorech, a salesman at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., with insider trading in credit default swaps of VNU N.V. The SEC stated at the time that the case represented the SEC’s first insider trading enforcement action involving credit default swaps.
