Former Apple Lawyer Gene Levoff Pleads Guilty to Insider Trading

[Admiral]

One would think a corporate lawyer would be more cunning than this.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of discovery. Did Gene use shell companies to conduct the trades? Etc. etc.

There's not going to be discovery. Gene Levoff got pinched a very long time ago. He was fired in 2018, arrested in 2019. Now he's entered a plea to close out the ordeal.

Incidentally, I know and like Gene Levoff. He was genuinely decent to work with.

 

[svish]

No escaping from this one.

 

[fhall1]

He was probably being paid extremely well so I really don’t understand his thinking or reason for doing this. Just stupid and reckless.

I have to agree doing all that for what amounts to maybe two years compensation (counting the amount NOT lost), when you have such a cushy job is crazy...only thing I can figure is those are the amounts Apple felt they could easily prove. He might have actually made much more (or lost much less)

 

[SFjohn]

I do: Greed. Apple's main corporate value.

ANY corporate vale!

 

[cruiserPimp]

Q: Why don't sharks eat lawyers?
A: Professional courtesy.

 

[alia]

I’m a lawyer, and literally the first day of my corporations class in law school, the professor said… NEVER trade on corporate information. The SEC will come for you first, because as lawyers, we are low hanging fruit. They know we have insider information and all trades are public record. And here we have Exhibit A…..

 

[hummerchine]

He was probably being paid extremely well so I really don’t understand his thinking or reason for doing this. Just stupid and reckless.

You nailed it….my thought exactly

 

[ds2000]

The sentences seem extreme when compared to other heinous criminal activity. I guess that really shows where society is at.

 

[JamieLannister]

It’s always the human factor.

An example that you can probably understand better would be a man who has a super hot wife. But decided to wander and fornicate with someone else less hot.

Or if you want to be woke about it another example would be a woman who has a hot man but decided to fornicate with a fat slob who’s substandard.

Wait not woke enough? how about a woman who has a partner wife who’s super beautiful but decides to turn herself into a man and date another ugly woman.

Regardless of what absurd gender or lack of one you want to support it’s always mankind is extremely fickle when it comes to being normal.

 

[appleinsidertraders]

Insider trading is rampet at Apple. As a former employee of 19 years it's common knowledge that employees hide the ticker symbols for suppliers of new products inside jpegs and use stock platforms like robbinhood to distribute the information and enrich themselves. If the SEC were to take a deeper look at the friends and family making stock purchases in advance of announcements of new products they would find virtually every employee in the engineering group involved in fraud.

 

[Little Endian]

Insider trading is rampet at Apple. As a former employee of 19 years it's common knowledge that employees hide the ticker symbols for suppliers of new products inside jpegs and use stock platforms like robbinhood to distribute the information and enrich themselves. If the SEC were to take a deeper look at the friends and family making stock purchases in advance of announcements of new products they would find virtually every employee in the engineering group involved in fraud.

I worked for a company as well where insider trading was rampant. I never participated in any of it as I never held company stock. It was so bad that employees actually had private channels in Slack where they would discuss trades. HR & Legal eventually caught wind and cracked down internally. Ironically though much of the discussion and collaboration moved to Discord and still continued in some form last I knew.

I don't think anyone was ever fired though. The company at the time had some 1200 employees and I would guesstimate that a few hundered were engaged in some form of questionable trade activity. So maybe 20-30% of the company. Most of these people were regular rank and file employees, definitely not executive or upper management. This is the reason they don't get caught or persued by the SEC.

The SEC seems to be more interested in big fish and low hanging fruit. So as mentioned earlier they go after lawyers, executives, directors and upper management. Easier to prove cases and bigger wins in prosecuting them.

Harder to prove that some regular support agent, IT, marketing, or sales employee who happens to be aware of roadmaps or revenue numbers of wrong doing. It is too hard to limit all sensitive information within an organization. The employees will always be more aware than the general public and its almost impossible to control what they say or who they talk to outside of work.

For heavens sake we are on a website called Macrumors!! Most all of the leaks we get are from insiders or though their supply chain.

 

[appleinsidertraders]

When management hoses your career opportunities and you wind up in a little room with HR after reporting what they did and they tell you that there is zero tolerance for retaliation but you have your identity stolen by your peers to smear your reputation and put you on the block for a 5 million dollar fine and 20 years in jail maybe you post to Mac Rumors about the injustice. Especially when the CEO of the company stands on the world stage and tells you privacy is the corner stone of their products and ecosystem but is willing to participate in your demise.

I see Tim Cook is taking a 40% pay cut. About time. Maybe the employees wouldn't need to commit fraud if they paid them appropriately. To start, the compensation team should take those shares and give them to the people that make the magic happen.

tcook@apple.com. He never responded to my complaints while I was an employee or after I left but they sure have continued to access my iCloud account and cover their asses.