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Unless they can prove they intended to sell that stock anyway before they had knowledge of the hack, that seems criminal.
by eloff 7y ago
Unless they can prove they intended to sell that stock anyway before they had knowledge of the hack, that seems criminal.
- jolmg 7y agoIsn't that guilty until proven innocent? Rather, I would think that whoever does the prosecution would need to prove the execs knew of the hack prior to selling the stock. The execs don't have to prove anything.
- all2 7y agoA subpoena of exec email accounts could sort out who knew what very quickly.
- firethief 7y agoWhen you are exposed to information that it would be improper to act on, you generally have to demonstrate affirmatively that your decisions aren't based on it to stay out of hot water. It's the same deal as clean-room reverse engineering, where you need separate teams with a lawyer as a firewall to prove you're only replicating certain aspects of the source. It's not that presumption of innocence isn't applicable; it's just, when your defense is that you tracked provenance in your head and were careful to ignore the tainted information when thinking about certain things, it probably won't be hard to prove you guilty.
- eloff 7y agoIf they're high level execs, presumably they know about major company news. I don't think that's hard for the prosecution to establish.
- perl4ever 7y agoExecutives do normally schedule selling stock ahead of time. If no investigation is happening, that might be one obvious explanation.
- refurb 7y agoYup. It’s rare for senior executive to not preschedule stock sales. Otherwise it’s too hard to prove you didn’t act on insider info since they see such info every day.