Justice Department Begins Criminal Probe Into Equifax Executive Stock Sales

The U. S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether top officials at Equifax violated insider trading laws when they sold stock before the company disclosed that it had been hacked, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Equifax disclosed earlier this month that it discovered a security breach on July 29. The three executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in early August. The company has said the managers didn’t know of the breach at the time they sold the shares.
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As we noted previously, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, said it was ‘disturbing’ that it appeared executives sold their stock before disclosing material information to the public.
‘If that happened, somebody needs to go to jail,’ Heitkamp said at a credit union industry conference in Washington.
‘It’s a problem when people can act with impunity with no consequences. How is that not insider trading?’
The three executives are…

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Sep 18, 2017.