The Ontario Securities Commission on Friday dismissed charges of insider trading against ATI Technologies chairman K.Y. Ho and his wife Betty.

A panel of OSC commissioners ruled that enforcement staff at the securities regulator failed to prove that the couple knew the company would fail to meet revenue and earnings forecasts before they divested thousands of shares.

In April of this year, an OSC investigator testified that Ho donated millions of dollars worth of ATI shares to three Toronto charities just weeks before they plunged to half their value.

OSC investigator Jody Sikora testified at the OSC hearing that Ho gave a total of 254,000 shares to the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care, the Havergal private school for girls and the Princess Margaret cancer centre.

The shares of the computer graphics chipmaker were worth more than $7 million when the gifts were made in April 2000.

However, they lost half their value in two days after the company announced, on May 24, that it would miss analysts’ expectations and post a loss for the quarter spanning March to May 2000.

The OSC’s enforcement branch alleged Ho was aware of that information and managed to maximize his tax benefit by donating the shares in advance of the profit warning, thus avoiding a $3.6 million decline in the value of his gifts.

Ho, who co-founded ATI, denied wrongdoing. His wife also faced allegations of breaking securities laws by selling ATI stock in late April and early May 2000.

“We would not be doing our job of enforcing the capital markets if we only brought cases that were clear winners,” said Michael Watson, director of enforcement at the OSC, in a release.

“The other respondents involved in this case settled with us and admitted wrongdoing,” Watson said.

The OSC had also investigated ATI’s former director of investor relations Jo-Anne Chang, her husband David Stone, ATI former marketing manager Mary de la Torre, and her husband Alan Rae.

De la Torre and Rae settled with the OSC. They received an $11,050 penalty, a reprimand and a six-month securities trading ban. Chang and Stone agreed to pay almost $1.5 million.

In late March 2005, ATI Technologies received a $900,000 fine and a reprimand as part of a settlement with the OSC over allegations of slow disclosure of the sales and earnings warning in 2000.