Federal authorities announced on Thursday a raft of criminal charges against SAC Capital, the hedge fund run by the billionaire Steven A. Cohen, an unusually aggressive move that could cripple one of Wall Street’s most successful stock trading firms.
In the 41-page indictment that includes four counts of securities fraud and one count of wire fraud, prosecutors charged the fund and its units with carrying out a broad insider trading scheme between 1999 and 2010. The case seeks to attribute certain criminal acts of employees to the company itself.
The indictment also takes aim at SAC for “an institutional indifference” to wrongdoing that “resulted in insider trading that was substantial, pervasive and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.”