The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in a third insider-trading trial defeat in the past year, lost its lawsuit claiming STEC Inc.’s former chief executive officer made $134 million by selling stock before divulging a sales setback to investors.
Federal jurors in Santa Ana, California, returned their verdict on the first day of deliberations.
The SEC claimed Manouchehr Moshayedi, who co-founded the maker of computer-storage cards with his two brothers in 1990, sold 4.5 million STEC shares in an August 2009 secondary offering after learning that a major customer, EMC Corp. (EMC), would scale back purchases of the ZeusIOPS flash memory product. [Bloomberg]
