It would be interesting to see a breakout of men version women. One of the examples in the article is a woman who had one of the most severe sentences. And looking back, as wrong as Martha Stewart may have been, her jail sentence always struck me as unusually extreme compared to the punishment of others. The Galleon story has always struck me as being a bit odd as well. It does look odd that a dark-skinned CEO is being targeted over $45 million. Yes, it's a lot of money but pocket change compared to the trillions lost by Wall Street.
At a higher level, how it is that insider trading cases have been met with punishment yet the bigger players on Wall Street have walked away even stronger after crashing the global economy? There's something fundamentally wrong with the system that allows and excuses this. Bloomberg:
Almost half of the 43 defendants who were sentenced in Manhattan federal court in the past eight years for insider trading avoided a prison term, with many never seeing the inside of a jail cell because they cooperated with prosecutors.
Nineteen who were sentenced since 2003, or 44 percent, weren’t incarcerated, an analysis of court cases by Bloomberg showed. Of the remainder, the average defendant got a prison term of 18.4 months. The greater the profit made on illegal trades, the longer the sentence. The longest term was 10 years. Danielle Chiesi, who pleaded guilty yesterday for her role in the Galleon Group LLC hedge fund insider-trading scandal, faces between 37 and 46 months in prison.
Since 2009, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan has stepped up insider-trading prosecutions, charging more than 30 people in three overlapping rings. Of the three defendants sentenced so far in the Galleon ring, the average sentence has been 17 months. The nationwide investigation has implicated hedge funds, technology companies and so-called expert- networking firms.
