One setback for the SEC came this year after the agency sued unknown buyers of securities in Spain’s Telvent GIT SA. Two days earlier, Schneider Electric SA, the world’s biggest maker of low- and medium-voltage equipment, said it would buy Telvent. The agency said the buyers made $475,000 in illicit profit.

Lebanon Firm

After the SEC won a freeze order, Beirut, Lebanon-based Iris Capital Securities SAL and Chief Executive Officer Antoine Khalife answered the claims in court papers.

They called themselves “innocent victims of an investigatory net cast too wide.”

Only after suing did the SEC review hundreds of trading records and question Khalife, according to his lawyer, Jeffrey Eilender. The agency told a judge in May that it planned to dismiss the suit. It has yet to do so.

“Mr. Khalife wants to be vindicated,” Eilender said in an interview, adding that his client had legitimate reasons for his trades. “This case has already ruined Iris Capital’s business.”

Another investor who responded to a SEC lawsuit, Madrid resident Luis Sanchez, persuaded a Chicago federal judge last year to dismiss the SEC claim that he’d bought options after being tipped about a 2010 takeover offer for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc., the world’s largest fertilizer producer. After he was sued in 2010, Sanchez said at a deposition that he’d been following Potash’s industry for many years, according to court records.

’No Evidence’

The SEC claimed Sanchez erased his computer hard drives, which he denied, according to court papers.

“There was no evidence of an insider who passed on inside information,” his lawyer, Jonathan Buck, said in an interview.

First « 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 » Next