Insider Trader Gets Jail as SEC Reconsiders Tool That Caught Him

Yahoo

28-04-2025

(Bloomberg) -- An Oregon retiree was ordered to spend a year behind bars for conspiring with a Nuveen LLC trader in a $47 million insider trading scheme — a case flagged by a controversial SEC tracking tool the Trump administration is considering reining in.
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Alan Williams, 79, was sentenced Monday by a federal judge in Manhattan. Both he and the former Nuveen trader, Lawrence Billimek, pleaded guilty in 2023. Last May Billimek, 54, received a nearly six-year sentence for tipping off Williams to thousands of trades by Nuveen, a unit of TIAA that manages $1.3 trillion in assets. US District Judge Paul Gardephe noted that Williams had cooperated with the government against Billimek.
The case was one of the first criminal cases brought based on data gathered by the Consolidated Audit Trail, a powerful database tracking as many as 500 billion trades a day that the Securities and Exchange Commission has been building for more than a decade. But Wall Street firms and Congressional Republicans have called for the CAT to be shut down, and new SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, who was sworn in last week, has also previously expressed doubts about it.
Legal experts have said a scheme like Billimek and Williams' would not have been uncovered without CAT. Though major insider-trading cases have often focused on single-market events like merger announcements, the Nuveen one involved some 1,697 intraday equity trades made by Williams. The SEC found that he had a 97% 'win rate' over a five-year period, which had less than one-in-a-trillion odds of occurring randomly.
But Citadel Securities LLC and the American Securities Association, a trade group representing regional financial institutions, sued the SEC over the CAT in 2023, claiming that the regulator can't operate such a tool without Congressional authorization. Citadel's suit received backing from Republican politicians, who've expressed concern that the CAT could be used to monitor investors' political and religious beliefs.
With Donald Trump back in the White House, the debate over CAT is now within the SEC itself. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto for creating a more powerful Republican presidency, explicitly called for the database to be terminated. Atkins said during his confirmation hearing that the CAT needs to be reviewed, saying that the costs have 'ballooned' and that its mission 'has kind of veered off.'
Even before Atkins' confirmation, the financial industry began lobbying the administration for changes to the database. The SEC has already exempted identifiable information such as names and birth years from being stored in the database. In February, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, another Wall Street trade group, urged the SEC to pause fee collections from brokers related to the CAT.
Along with the Nuveen case, the SEC has said the CAT was partly responsible for two other enforcement actions. A Federal Reserve bank examiner in November pleaded guilty to trading on confidential information about companies he supervised, and a Florida trader in December settled claims that he used 'spoof' orders to manipulate thinly-traded securities.
'Embarrassed and Ashamed'
At his sentencing Monday, Williams apologized to the court, his family and Nuveen employees and clients. 'I'm embarrassed and ashamed,' he said.
Williams faced as much as 75 years in prison, although white-collar criminals rarely receive the maximum penalty. Federal sentencing guidelines called for a punishment of 57 to 71 months behind bars.
Billimek, who was responsible for routing orders based on Nuveen portfolio managers' decisions, admitted to tipping off Williams about Nuveen's planned trades in stocks, including Lululemon Athletica Inc. and Ulta Beauty Inc., as part of a complex plot that also involved the use of burner phones to hide their interactions from authorities.
In one example provided by prosecutors, the scheme netted more than $55,000 in profits one day in August 2022 by shorting shares of Match Group Inc. ahead of substantial sales by Nuveen.
Williams, a onetime head trader for Sutro & Co. in San Francisco, had asked Gardephe to keep him out of prison, calling himself an 'uncommonly decent and giving man' and noting that he suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease. The judge said a non-custodial sentence wasn't possible, given the 'blatant nature' of the conduct and the number of illegal trades.
The case is US v Billimek, 22-cr-675, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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