A former Goldman Sachs Group banker was accused of passing insider trading information to a squash buddy, part of a group of nine people charged Monday by federal prosecutors in New York.
Brijesh Goel, 37, worked at the bank in New York from 2013 until about 2021, eventually reaching the position of vice president. Through his role, Goel received confidential emails from the bank’s Firmwide Capital Committee about potential mergers, according to court documents.
Prosecutors allege he passed tips to another person, who traded on the information and split profits with Goel.
The government didn’t identify Goel’s former employer, but people familiar with the matter said Goel was at Goldman.
“The 2017 and 2018 insider trading alleged by the government is egregious conduct,” Goldman said in a statement. “The firm condemns such behavior, which violates our standards of conduct and business principles. We are fully cooperating” with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
‘Did you book the court?’
According to prosecutors, the trading included several takeover deals, including T-Mobile and Sprint, Spirit Airlines and Frontier Group Holdings.
In one instance, prosecutors said that when Goel received an email about a potential takeover target for EQT Partners, he texted his friend, “Let’s play Squash after work,” and that evening suggested that his friend buy call options in the target company.
The next day, he asked his friend via text, “Did you book the court?” Prosecutors allege this was his “coded way of asking” whether the friend had purchased call options.
In a separate court filing, the SEC said Goel passed tips to a foreign exchange trader and longtime friend named Akshay Niranjan, 33, with whom he often played squash.
Met as grad students
According to the SEC complaint, Goel and Niranjan met as graduate business students in California and moved to New York together in 2013. In addition to playing squash, they frequently took overseas trips together and, at times, lived in the same apartment building.
Goel is among nine people charged, including former Republican member of Congress Stephen Buyer, who represented Indiana from 1993 to 2011. Buyer is accused of taking confidential information from two of his consulting business’s clients and trading on it.
Prosecutors allege he traded on it first in 2018 while working for T-Mobile US, when he learned that it planned to acquire Sprint, and then the next year when he learned that his client Guidehouse LLP was going to purchase Navigant Consulting. Prosecutors said he earned profits of at least $349,000.
The U.S. said one of the accounts that Buyer used to trade was shared with a relative who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on an investment Buyer had led the relative to make that he promised to pay back. Another was in the name of a female friend that he previously had a romantic relationship with, the government claims.
FBI trainee
He also is accused of sending himself reports on the companies and notes to himself to make it seem like he was researching the stocks, and of lying to investigators probing the trades.
Prosecutors also named Seth Markin, alleging he was an FBI agent trainee when he made more than $1.4 million in 2021 after he “stole” inside information from his then girlfriend, who at the time was an associate “at a major law firm in Washington DC.”
Markin is accused of secretly looking through his girlfriend’s confidential work documents without her permission and finding out that Merck & Co. was going to acquire Pandion Therapeutics, a biotech company, for about three times the value of Pandion’s share price.
— With assistance from Patricia Hurtado.
