SAC’s Rigorous Compliance Training Focused On Coming Up With Euphemisms For Insider Trading

The indictment that the Justice Department just filed against SAC Capital is something to behold.

One hopes “black edge” wasn’t on the list. Anyway, today’s indictment against SAC, for wire fraud and securities fraud, is something to behold:

“For example, on or about July 29, 2009, a recently hired SAC PM (the ‘New PM’) sent an instant message to [Steve Cohen] and relayed that, due to some ‘recent research,’ the New PM planned to short Nokia when he started work 10 days later. The New PM apologized for being ‘cryptic’ but noted that the head of SAC compliance ‘was giving me Rules 101 yesterday – so I won’t be saying much[.] [T]oo scary.'”

Possibly the weirdest part here is that new hires got compliance lectures two weeks before they showed up at the firm? But maybe not; the DOJ takes a pretty dim view of SAC’s hiring process generally, and if you believe the DOJ that SAC’s main hiring criterion was “is good at insider trading,” then you could imagine the need for a little pre-start-date warning in email etiquette:

Continue reading over at DealBreaker….

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