Saiyed Atiq Raza, prominent Silicon Valley Pakistani-American and venture investor, agreed to pay $3m in fine to settle SEC charges of insider trading, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The charges against Saiyed Atiq Raza, 58 years old, a former president and chief operating officer of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., stemmed from trades he made in 2006 while serving as a director of San Francisco orthodontic device maker OrthoClear Holdings Inc. Under the terms of the agreement, Mr. Raza was also barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years, and he was permanently enjoined from future violations of the federal securities laws.
The SEC alleged that Mr. Raza in September 2006 was informed by OrthoClear's chief executive Zia Chishti that the company had agreed to cease competing with rival Align Technology Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif. The agreement, which effectively put OrthoClear out of business, followed a long-running intellectual-property rights dispute between the transparent teeth-aligner market competitors.
According to the SEC, Mr. Raza within two days of learning about the settlement began making large purchases of Align call options -- which would increase in value if the company's share price rose -- before the litigation settlement agreement became public. When the OrthoClear settlement was publicly announced several days later, the price of Align stock shot up 48% and Mr. Raza netted a profit of $1,450,900, the SEC said.
Zia Chishti is a Pakistani-American founder of both Align and OrthoClear. Zia is also the founder of The Resource Group, a company with call centers in Pakistan serving clients in the United States.
Threre are more reasons to migrate to Canada
1 year ago
4 comments:
Atiq's ethics have always been the talk of the town. He is an ordinary thug who with the power of his personality has separated fools from their money. AmCc acquisition of Yuni is one such example. How and why do entrpreneurs go to him for capital?
Anil Kumar, one of the Indian-Americans accused in the insider trading case, has pleased guilty, according to media reports:
Anil Kumar, a former director of global management consulting firm McKinsey, has pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
He says he made $2.6m (£1.6m) giving inside market information to one of America's richest men, Raj Rajaratnam.
Prosecutors allege a list of crimes, including that Mr Rajaratnam paid Kumar between $1.7-$2m for his tips.
Kumar entered the plea in a US District Court in Manhattan in a co-operation deal aimed at strengthening the government case against Mr Rajaratnam.
Secret tip-offs
The billionaire hedge-fund operator is said to have made $19m from investments after Kumar, a former senior partner and director at McKinsey & Co fed him tips between March and July 2006 about the acquisition of ATI Technologies by Advanced Micro Device.
But this week, John Dowd, Mr Rajaratnam's lawyer, said: "An analyst's prediction that AMD would acquire ATI was widely reported in the press more than seven weeks before the acquisition was announced."
The government filed papers this week in Mr Rajaratnam's case to say they planned to file additional charges against him after learning about the $19m, which prosecutors say raises the amount Mr Rajaratnam made from illegal deals to at least $36m in profits.
A Pakistani-American executive Kamal Ahmed has been caught in the Galleon financial scandal. Here's an excerpt from a San Francisco Chronicle report:
.. Kamal Ahmed, a Morgan Stanley managing director in Menlo Park. According to federal prosecutors, he provided inside information about Advance Micro Devices' July 2006 takeover of a Canadian firm, ATI Technologies, information that ultimately found its way to the captain of the pirate ship hedge fund, Raj Rajaratnam.
Ahmed's alleged involvement was revealed in a government court document Friday concerning Rajaratnam's trial, scheduled for Feb. 28.
The 42-year-old banker is cooperating with investigators, said his lawyer, Douglas Tween of New York's Baker & McKenzie in a statement. He is "confident that when the investigation is completed, and all the facts are gathered, it will be shown that he did nothing illegal or unethical."
According to securities filings and other sources, Ahmed works at Morgan Stanley's investment practice in Menlo Park. He was one of 241 new managing directors named by Morgan Stanley in December 2007.
On its website, OPEN Silicon Valley, a Pakistani American business organization, Ahmed, a Los Altos resident, is described as having "led a wide variety of financing transactions and has executed numerous mergers & acquisitions" for Morgan Stanley since 1999," according to information Ahmed provided to the organization.
Prior experience included stints at Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston.
According to Institutional Investor, Ahmed was one of two Morgan Stanley managing directors advising Hewlett-Packard on its $2.7 billion takeover of 3Com last year, earning the investment bank tens of millions of dollars in fees.
He is listed on the advisory board of Folio3, a Redwood City organization with offices in Pakistan and Bulgaria, which is "focused on helping entrepreneurs and small enterprises successfully build and manage an offshore software development presence."
A Yale economics graduate and Cornell University MBA, with 383 connections according to his LinkedIn profile, Ahmed could have plenty to say if he's cooperating with the feds. Morgan Stanley advised AMD on the ATI deal, and provided a $2.5 billion loan to finance it.
Saratoga resident Anil Kumar, a McKinsey consultant since fired by the firm, pleaded guilty and was fined $2.8 million last year for providing insider information to Rajaratnam, including the planned AMD takeover of ATI.
Indian-Americans are being scrutinized by the IRS for tax evasion, according to a NY Times report:
Last July and September, the Justice Department mailed “target” letters to around 50 Indian-Americans with offshore bank accounts, telling them that they were under scrutiny for suspected offshore tax evasion through accounts in India, Mr. Horn said.
Credit Suisse and Swiss cantonal banks are also under scrutiny. Robert Katzberg, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer in New York, said that the pressure on HSBC showed that “the fallout of the UBS scandal, which still has far to go within Switzerland, has spread to other countries.”
The request, made in court papers filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco, seeks to force HSBC’s main United States affiliate, HSBC Bank USA, to turn over details of accounts held by wealthy Americans from 2002 through 2010 through the bank’s affiliate in India, HSBC India. Approval from a federal judge is required before the Internal Revenue Service can issue the summons.
HSBC Bank USA operated representative offices for HSBC India under the name N.R.I. Services — N.R.I. stands for Non-Resident Indian — in New York and Fremont, Calif., according to court documents. The offshore private banking services were offered to people of Indian origin living outside of India.
In a statement, HSBC said that “while we haven’t seen the summons, HSBC does not condone tax evasion and fully supports the U.S. efforts to promote appropriate payment of taxes by U.S. taxpayers.”
It continued, “While complying with the law in all the jurisdictions in which it operates, including India, HSBC cooperates with requests from U.S. authorities.”
The statement added: “We have been engaged in a constructive dialogue with U.S. authorities. We hope any ‘I.R.S. Summons’ issues can be resolved expeditiously.” A bank spokeswoman, Juanita Gutierrez, declined to comment further.
HSBC is one of the biggest banks for clients from India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere in the East, according to top tax lawyers. In 2007, the bank said in a press release announcing the opening of its N.R.I. office in Fremont, Calif., that it served more than 160,000 non-resident Indians worldwide.
The release announced a “new banking solution” for nonresident Indians “that allows the N.R.I. community to conduct cross-border banking transactions.” In 2003, after the technology bubble, Merrill Lynch estimated that there were 200,000 millionaires of Indian origin in the United States alone, part of the explosion of wealth among Indians in recent years.
In January, federal prosecutors indicted a former HSBC client, Vaibhav Dahake, who was born in India and became a naturalized American citizen in 2006. Mr. Dahake, according to court papers, told prosecutors that HSBC had sought out wealthy Indian-Americans for undeclared offshore banking services through N.R.I. Services. The bank was not identified in the papers but was confirmed at the time as HSBC by people close to the matter.
Mr. Dahake, according to his indictment, told prosecutors that his banker had told him that no United States disclosure forms were required, that the account was not taxable in India and that no forms reporting the interest income would be filed with the I.R.S.
Holding a foreign or offshore account is legal, but American citizens and residents must file annual disclosures with the I.R.S. for accounts with more than $10,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/business/global/08tax.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hsbc%20india&st=cse
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