A Vancouver man who admitted to insider trading has agreed to a three-year trading ban and to make a payment equal to the illicit trading’s profits plus 50% to a regulator.<\/p>\n
In a settlement with the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), Aaron Keay admitted to violating the public interest when he directed a couple of relatives to purchase shares in a venture company when he had inside information about the company \u2014 namely, that it was going to be involved in a reverse takeover transaction (RTO) \u2014 and when he told the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) that he wasn’t aware of any trading in the shares.<\/p>\n
The company’s stock was halted in May 2022, given the pending transaction, and trading didn’t resume until February 2023, after the deal was approved.<\/p>\n
Once trading resumed, the shares acquired by Keay’s relatives could have been sold for a profit of $200,000 to $225,000, the regulator said \u2014 although, at this point, the shares haven’t been sold.<\/p>\n
According to the settlement, Keay admitted that directing the share purchases amounted to insider trading, as he was deemed to be in a “special relationship” with the company, and had known about the RTO, which hadn’t been publicly announced.<\/p>\n
He also admitted to violating the public interest by denying knowledge of the trading to the TSXV.<\/p>\n
To settle the case, he agreed to pay $337,500 to the BCSC \u2014 which represents the potential insider trading profits plus 50% \u2014 along with a three-year trading ban and a one-year ban on serving as a director or officer of a public company.<\/p>\n
“It is a significant mitigating factor that Keay voluntarily approached the executive director about settlement and entered into this settlement agreement prior to the issuance of a notice of hearing, which has resulted in savings of time and costs,” the settlement noted.<\/p>\n
The settlement also said that Keay “has expressed remorse for his conduct.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Man agrees to pay trading profits plus 50% to regulator<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147314,"featured_media":395827,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2312,2324],"tags":[2443,2355,2416],"yst_prominent_words":[5820,5834,7257,11838,11844,12318,12872,26531,35247,105236],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493589"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493589"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493607,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493589\/revisions\/493607"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493589"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=493589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}