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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edscharp who wrote (87428)	10/11/2004 3:53:51 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 122087

If the prosecution proves that Elgindy conspired with FBI agents to gain illegal access to classified government databases, what he did with the information later is just a minor afterthought. Most folks don't seem to get the main issues here. John Ashcroft busted someone who cracked his FBI and used it for his own purposes. That's a VERY big deal in the current climate. The penalties for the stock trading charges are minor in comparison, IMHO.

To: Edscharp who wrote (87428)	10/11/2004 5:43:08 AM
From: scion	Respond to of 122087

I think Byron's argument loses sight of the prosecution's claim that there was use of illegally acquired insider information - and that's the sticking point here: Yet instead of stopping with the argument that Elgindy had schemed to acquire the information illegally, the government went further and in a pretrial memorandum in the case argued that Elgindy had no right to publicize the information in order to drive down the price. But why not? Where does it say in any statute or case book of securities law that the public dissemination of accurate and truthful, but negative, information about a stock is illegal? What if the information had caused the stock price to go up instead of down? Would it still have been illegal to distribute it to the public? Gratuitous overreaching got the feds in trouble in the Martha Stewart case, when they foolishly attempted to extend the concept of insider trading at the expense of Martha's First Amendment right to speak publicly in her own defense. And something similar may be about to unfold in the Elgindy matter, as prosecutors set out to prove that his crimes went beyond the specific and provable things he did and enveloped the more general issue of what he was: a Wall Street short-seller. Being such a person isn't automatically a crime yet, but the case of the United States v. Amr I. Elgindy seems bent on making it one.