Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc late on Tuesday said it was “thoroughly reviewing” published reports fingering former chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz as the AMD executive who gave confidential company information to a defendant in the Galleon Group insider trading case.
“We are not aware of any allegation of criminal misconduct on the part of any current or former AMD employees, nor have any current or former AMD employees been charged with a crime,” AMD said in a statement.
A spokesman for the Sunnyvale, California-based company declined to comment further.
US ATTORNEY’S OFFICE
Citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Tuesday that Ruiz is the AMD executive described in the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office complaint as passing inside information to defendant Danielle Chiesi.
Chiesi, 43, was among six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested earlier this month in a hedge fund insider trading case that authorities say generated more than US$25 million in illegal profits.
Chiesi worked for New Castle, the equity hedge fund group of Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc that had assets worth about US$1 billion under management, court papers showed.
Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group portfolio manager at the center of the case, last week said Galleon would wind down its funds after publicity surrounding the case led some investors to pull out money.
Before he left AMD’s CEO job last year, Ruiz was only the second person to run the company other than founder and longtime CEO Jerry Sanders and was one of the few Hispanic CEOs of a major US corporation. Ruiz, now 63, left amid mounting investor frustration over AMD’s finances.
GLOBALFOUNDRIES
He was instrumental in orchestrating a fix: the spinoff of AMD’s manufacturing operations into a company called GlobalFoundries Inc, of which he is now chairman.
A GlobalFoundries spokesman on Tuesday would say only that the allegations predate the company’s launch.
AMD, which had US$5.8 billion in revenue last year, is small compared to its rival Intel Corp, which owns about 80 percent of the world’s microprocessor market.
Before word of Ruiz’s possible involvement surfaced, the highest-ranking corporate executive ensnared in the insider-trading scheme was an IBM Corp senior vice president, Robert Moffat, who was once considered a possible candidate for CEO. Moffat was put on leave after the allegations surfaced and no longer serves as an officer of the company.
Moffat is accused of leaking secrets about IBM’s earnings and financial dealings with partners, including AMD. That information allegedly included AMD’s plans for GlobalFoundries.
IBM was involved in those talks because it has a technology development partnership with AMD.
The indictment against Moffat and the person he’s accused of supplying information to, Chiesi, says that an AMD executive also provided inside information to Chiesi, but that executive is not named.
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