September 21, 2011
“The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that, on September 19, 2011, the Honorable Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York entered a consent judgment against Defendant Sunil Bhalla in SEC v. Feinblatt, 11-CV-0170, the last remaining defendant in an insider trading case the SEC filed on January 10, 2011.
The Complaint alleged that Bhalla, then a senior executive at Polycom, Inc. (“Polycom”) tipped Roomy Khan, an individual investor, to material, nonpublic information concerning Polycom’s financial performance and anticipated financial performance. The Complaint alleged that Khan traded on the information, and passed it on to certain other defendants in the case, who then traded on the basis of the Polycom inside information and other inside information given to them by Khan, reaping illicit trading profits, in the aggregate, of more than $15 million. The illicit trading profits resulting from Bhalla’s Polycom tip to Khan alleged in the complaint totaled approximately $2.5 million.
To settle the SEC’s charges, Bhalla consented to the entry of a judgment that: (i) permanently enjoins him from future violations of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder; (ii) orders him to pay a civil penalty of $85,000; and (iii) bars him from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 5 years from the date of the entry of the judgment.”