7 Indian-Origin Techies Charged In US For Insider Trading Worth Million Dollars
New York:
Seven Indian-origin persons have been charged by US federal authorities with insider trading in a scheme through which they made over a million dollars in illegal profits.
Hari Prasad Sure, 34, Lokesh Lagudu, 31 and Chotu Prabhu Tej Pulagam, 29, are friends and worked as software engineers at Twilio, a San Francisco-based cloud computing communications company, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday.
The complaint said Mr Sure tipped his close friend Dileep Kumar Reddy Kamujula, 35, who successfully traded in Twilio’s options. Mr Lagudu similarly tipped his girlfriend Sai Nekkalapudi, 30 with whom he lived, and he also tipped his former roommate and close friend Abhishek Dharmapurikar, 33. Mr Pulagam tipped his brother Chetan Prabhu Pulagam, 31. All the seven defendants live in California.
The SEC announced insider trading charges against the seven individuals for allegedly generating more than USD 1 million in collective profits by insider trading ahead of Twilio’s positive first quarter 2020 earnings announcement on May 6, 2020.
According to the SEC’s complaint, Mr Sure, Mr Lagudu and Mr Chotu Pulagam had access to various databases relevant to Twilio’s reporting of revenue.
As alleged, around March 2020, they learned through the databases that Twilio’s customers had increased their usage of the company’s products and services in response to health measures taken in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and concluded in a joint chat that Twilio’s stock price would “rise for sure.”
The SEC’s complaint alleges that despite receiving a company policy that prohibited them from insider trading, Mr Sure, Mr Lagudu and Mr Chotu Pulagam knowingly tipped off, or used the brokerage accounts of Mr Kamujula, Ms Nekkalapudi, Mr Dharmapurikar and Chetan Pulagam to trade Twilio options and stock in advance of its May 6, 2020 earnings announcement while in possession of the confidential information concerning customer usage.
According to the complaint, the scheme generated more than USD 1 million in illegal trading profits.
The SEC complaint said that Mr Sure, Mr Lagudu and Mr Chotu Pulagam “communicated at times in Telugu, a language used frequently in parts of India.” From late March to early May 2020, they engaged in discussions about the upcoming earnings announcement within a private chat channel they created at Twilio.
