Washington Post – In April 2008, a Morgan Stanley hedge fund manager named Joseph F. “Chip” Skowron III allegedly met a consultant to a Rockville biotech company at a hotel bar in Milan and slipped him an envelope containing at least $10,000.
As the government tells it, Skowron knew the Securities and Exchange Commission was looking into suspicious trading in shares of Human Genome Sciences — and he had reason to worry. At his direction, the SEC says, hedge funds he helped manage had dumped shares in Human Genome Sciences after the consultant, French physician Yves Benhamou, tipped him about serious problems in the testing of a once-promising drug.