The New York Sun – Suspicions that illegal insider trading may have preceded the year’s biggest and most publicized corporate takeover attempt — Microsoft’s hostile $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo — have prompted the Securities & Exchange Commission to commence a trading probe, knowledgable regulatory sources say.
The investigation is just one of nearly a dozen stock trading probes that were recently initiated by the SEC, The New York Sun has learned, and they include trading in some of the best-known names in Corporate America, regulatory sources tell me.
"It looks like some of Wall Street’s bad guys may be at it again; these guys never learn," one source said.
Confirmations of these investigations — which are not of the companies themselves, but rather focus solely on the trading in their stocks — are clearly documented in a series of information-seeking letters (known as Bluesheets) that the commission recently sent to the brokerage community. The Sun has obtained copies of those SEC letters, which detail 11 such probes, including the one into Yahoo’s securities.
