U.S. authorities on Friday charged a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission compliance examiner for allegedly making false statements to the SEC about the ownership of stocks that she and here husband were prohibited from holding under SEC rules.
Eugenia Cantiello, 46, has been charged with one count of making false statements, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said.
However, Cantiello has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the government that provides that the charges against her will be dismissed in three months if she complies with certain conditions and commits no further offences.
According to the allegations, SEC rules prohibit employees from owning stock in entities directly regulated by the commission, such as broker dealers and banks with broker-dealer subsidiaries. The agency’s rules also require employees to submit any proposed personal transactions in these securities to the SEC prior to executing them. It is alleged that Cantiello and her husband held approximately US$50,000 in one of these prohibited stocks; and, that, despite warnings and reminders from the SEC, she did not divest their holdings as required.
Instead, it is alleged that she held on to much of the stock past deadlines imposed by the SEC and later lied about her conduct in an investigation, falsely claiming that she had not been aware that her holdings were prohibited under the SEC rules.