Former Dow Jones & Co director David Li (
Li, 68, chairman of Bank of East Asia Ltd and a member of Hong Kong's legislature, will pay a fine of about US$8 million. Kan King Wong (
The commission approved the settlements at a closed-door meeting in Washington on Thursday and they may be announced as soon as next week, the sources said.
Li is the most high-profile figure to be penalized so far in an SEC crackdown on trading ahead of company mergers and acquisitions. The agency also sued former employees at UBS AG, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns Cos and Credit Suisse Group in the past year.
Li denied leaking confidential information after the SEC filed suit against the Wongs in federal court in Manhattan last May.
The suit claimed their well-timed bets on Dow Jones stocks earned them US$8.2 million in profit when Rupert Murdoch's News Corp unveiled a US$5.1 billion bid for the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Ranked by profits, the case was the largest among a spate of insider-trading lawsuits filed by US regulators against foreign investors last year.
In May, the SEC claimed that Ajaz Rahim, former head of investment banking for Faysal Bank Ltd in Karachi, Pakistan, reaped more than US$7 million by trading on tips from an associate at Credit Suisse in New York. SEC lawsuits also targeted people from Canada, Switzerland, the UK, Brazil and Taiwan.
Rahim has denied the accusations and is fighting extradition on related criminal charges.
Shares of Dow Jones surged 55 percent when News Corp's offer was announced on May 1. A week later, the SEC filed suit against the Wongs, claiming they bought 415,000 shares valued at more than US$15 million in less than three weeks, just before the takeover became public. Their buying spree allegedly accounted for more than 3 percent of the shares' total trading volume during the period.
The Financial Times reported late last month that Li was negotiating an agreement with the SEC.
A day later, the South China Morning Post quoted him saying he had "no knowledge" of the reported settlement.
He and the Wongs won't admit or deny wrongdoing under the accords, one of the people familiar with the case said.
Li will not be barred from serving as an officer or director at a US public company under his agreement with the SEC, the person said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last