Ex-Goldman banker guilty of insider trading

A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs has been convicted on insider trading charges for tipping a friend to pending merger deals, and trading on that information.

Following a seven-day trial, a jury convicted Brijesh Goel, a former banker at Goldman in New York, on four counts of securities fraud and one count of obstruction. He will be sentenced on Oct. 19.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, Goel received confidential, internal information about pending mergers and acquisitions that Goldman was potentially financing, and he passed along that information to a friend, Akshay Niranjan, a trader at another investment bank.

Niranjan then used his brother’s brokerage account to trade call options in firms that were being targeted for acquisition, generating approximately US$280,000 in illicit profits, which he shared with Goel.

Additionally, Goel obstructed investigations by both a grand jury, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), by deleting electronic evidence of the scheme, and asking Niranjan to do the same.

When the charges were originally filed back in July 2022, the SEC said that the case was one of several that it uncovered using data analysis to detect suspicious trading patterns.

“Brijesh Goel, a senior banker at a leading investment bank, betrayed the trust of his employer and unlawfully shared inside information with his squash partner in an agreement to trade on that information. A federal jury has now convicted Goel of insider trading, and he faces time in prison for his conduct,” said Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the SDNY, in a release.

James Langton

James is a senior reporter for Advisor.ca and its sister publication, Investment Executive. He has been reporting on regulation, securities law, industry news and more since 1994.