IR Firm Investigated for Selling Google Secrets to Hedge Fund

Market Street Partners, a small investor relations firm in San Francisco is caught up in an FBI investigation of insider trading of at the Galleon Group hedge fund. The Reuters story cites SEC documents that tell of an unnamed agency staffer selling insider information about its client Google to Galleon for between $100-$150k per quarter. Galleon shorted the stock (NASDAQ: GOOG) to the tune of $9 million in profits. Remarkably, this is the largest hedge fund insider trading case in history.

Unlike the “Golden Goose” scandal involving Brunswick Group partner Nina Devlin‘s husband Matthew, this one should result in the arrest of PR firm employee. According to all media reports, Matthew Devlin stole the secrets from his wife.

No one at Market Street has responded to media inquiries, except when visited at their offices:

“As we’ve said publicly we were not given any advance notice,” said one Market Street employee who declined to give her name when a reporter visited on Monday. “We have not been contacted by any law enforcement agencies. We are very willing and open to cooperating with any investigation but that’s really all we can say at this point.”

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