Former Goldman banker accused of passing inside tips to squash partner

A former Goldman Sachs banker was accused by US authorities of passing sensitive market information to his squash partner, in one of a series of insider trading cases announced by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Monday.

New York-based Brijesh Goel, 37, was one of nine defendants charged in four unrelated alleged schemes. Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission have also filed related civil cases.

According to the SEC’s complaint, Goel was accused of trading on material non-public information gleaned from his job at Goldman, where he worked from 2013 until 2021.

The SEC said the alleged scheme started in 2017 and netted Goel and Akshay Niranjan, a 33-year-old trader at Barclays in New York, $291,735 in profits. The two were friends from graduate school and played squash together, the SEC said.

Authorities alleged that Niranjan used information shared with him by Goel to trade in shares of companies including Lumos Networks, PharMerica Corporation and Calgon Carbon using call options — a bet that the price of the underlying security will rise.

In a statement, Goldman said the insider trading alleged by the government “is egregious and illegal conduct”.

“The firm condemns such behaviour, which violates our standards of conduct and business principles. We are fully co-operating with the SEC and DoJ,” Goldman said.

Goel joined Apollo from Goldman last year as principal on the firm’s structured finance team. Apollo learned of the allegation on Monday and placed him on indefinite leave, a company spokeswoman said.

Reed Brodsky, a lawyer for Goel, said in a statement: “Sadly, the government rushed to charge Brijesh on the apparent say-so of one person about something that supposedly happened years ago before Brijesh’s current job — without giving Brijesh the chance to speak with them, unfairly tarring his name . . . Brijesh looks forward to demonstrating his innocence.”

A lawyer for Niranjan, who was named in the SEC’s civil complaint but not the DoJ’s criminal case, and Barclays declined to comment.

Prosecutors also brought charges on Monday against Stephen Buyer, an ex-congressman who allegedly traded on information picked up at a golf outing. Buyer, 63, served as a congressman from Indiana from 1993 to 2011. After leaving Congress, he set up Steve Buyer Group, a consulting firm whose clients included T-Mobile.

In a parallel civil case, the SEC said that Buyer learned about T-Mobile’s plan to acquire rival Sprint, while at a golf outing in March 2018 with a T-Mobile executive. The next day, the SEC said, Buyer began purchasing Sprint securities. When news of the merger broke, Buyer netted more than $107,000 in profits, the SEC alleged.

In 2019, according to the SEC’s complaint, Buyer purchased more than $1mn worth of stock in Navigant Consulting ahead of a public announcement that it would be acquired by Guidehouse, which was one of Buyer’s clients.

Andrew Goldstein, a partner at Cooley and Buyer’s lawyer, said his client was innocent.

“His stock trades were lawful. He looks forward to being quickly vindicated,” Goldstein said in a statement.