A former quantitative analyst who admitted to securities fraud in connection with a front-running scheme has been sentenced to jail time.
Last December, Sergei Polevikov pled guilty to fraud for misappropriating confidential information from his employer, an asset manager, as part of a scheme to trade ahead of his firm’s planned trades for clients.
“Polevikov’s scheme was designed to profit by executing trades that take advantage of relatively small price movements in a company’s stock that follow from large securities orders executed by the [firm] on behalf of its clients,” noted the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in a release.
By trading ahead of those large orders, he generated US$8.5 million in illicit profits.
Polevikov has now been sentenced to 33 months in prison by a U.S. district court judge. He was also ordered to disgorge the US$8.5 million and to pay a US$10,000 fine.