Former Rep. Stephen Buyer (R-Ind.), 64, was sentenced to nearly two years in prison in New York on Tuesday for insider trading.
The nine-term former congressman was sentenced to 22 months in prison for trading inside information he learned as a consultant to two separate companies before they merged.
After leaving office in 2011, Buyer worked as a corporate consultant. Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, convicted and sentenced Buyer.
“He abused positions of trust for illicit personal gain and today he faces justice for those actions,” Williams wrote in a statement released Tuesday. “No insider trader is above the law, and we will continue to bring to justice those who undermine the fairness and integrity of our markets.”
In March, Buyer was convicted of four counts of misusing non-public information about his former consulting clients.
In July 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Buyer and nine others with insider trading. The SEC alleged that Buyer used the information he received as a consultant for personal gain. The buyer received $568,000 in Sprint shares in 2018 after learning that a merger was planned between Sprint and T-Mobile, officials said.
T-Mobile was a client of Steve Buyer Group, a buyer consulting firm. According to evidence presented at trial, Buyer engaged in two separate, interrelated insider trading deals to “make timely, profitable securities trades based on the information he stole.”
In 2019, Buyer traded shares of Navigant Consulting Group prior to the organization’s acquisition by Guidehouse. Evidence presented in court revealed that Buyer “earned over $223,000 from his illegal Navigant business.”
When Buyer testified in March 2023, he provided a false explanation for his trading. At sentencing, U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman found Buyer’s statements to constitute obstruction of justice.
The purchaser was ordered to pay more than $350,000 in forfeiture and restitution.
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Source: thehill.com
