The FTC has sued to block the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history. The regulator has decided to block Kroger’s $25 billion bid for Albertsons, warning that the deal would raise prices and damage union workers’ bargaining power.
Insider trading from home
The husband of a former BP mergers and acquisitions executive who pleaded guilty this month to eavesdropping on their phone conversations and then illegally making $1.76 million from his findings isn’t the only one exploiting remote work to get paid to access confidential information. For example, there’s also the Chief Compliance Officer (yes, the Chief Compliance Officer!), who is accused of trading on information he stole from his girlfriend’s laptop. (He pleaded guilty under a cooperation agreement with the Justice Department.) Or the husband who, while his wife was taking business calls on the way to a family vacation, learned that their company was about to miss earnings expectations and was soon accused of insider trading. (He agreed to pay the SEC more than $300,000 to settle the charges, without admitting or denying the allegations.)
It’s not a new problem, but the post-Covid era of remote work has made it more common. And companies are not prepared. “Many employers have fairly strong privacy policies,” said Laura Sack, partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. “Less sophisticated methods of breaching confidentiality, such as eavesdropping on a conversation, receive less attention.”
Treating family as an exception to confidentiality is a common but risky approach. “Do I think this happens every day? Yes,” said Robert Hinckley Jr., a shareholder in Buchalter’s Denver office. “Are you doing this as a lawyer? NO.” Sack cites a hypothetical worst-case scenario: You share confidential information with your spouse, and when you break up, that person tries to use it against you. Ellenor Stone, a partner at Morris Manning & Martin, says that She sometimes tells her clients about the former head of a prep school who was awarded an $80,000 discrimination settlement – but the school later refused to pay it, citing a confidentiality agreement, after his daughter posted about it on Facebook .
Can confidential conversations even take place in the home office era? Stone, who often works on sensitive human resources issues, says that when she knows someone else may be eavesdropping on her, even at home, she messages the person she’s talking to and creates code words for the conversation – for example: “When I say Bob, I mean Brian, and when I talk about back surgery, I’m talking about Brian’s heart condition.” Sack said her husband has referred to their parked car as a “mobile office” during the pandemic because it’s often the only place where she could guarantee that she would not be within earshot of anyone.
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2024-03-02 13:35:51
www.nytimes.com
