A former Bank of New York Mellon Corp trader on Friday pleaded guilty to insider trading based on tips from a former Merck & Co Inc employee about potential pharmaceutical mergers. Federal prosecutors in New York said David Post, 41, a product manager at the bank, received nonpublic information from a former Rutgers Business School classmate about three companies: Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Ardea BioSciences and ViroPharma Inc. Prosecutors did not name the classmate, but on Oct. 14 they charged Zachary Zwerko, a former senior finance analyst with Merck, with passing inside tips about the same three stocks to a Rutgers classmate who worked at a bank. The connection was confirmed when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday amended a parallel civil complaint against Zwerko to include Post as a defendant. According to criminal and civil court filings, Zwerko passed information to Post about Merck's acquisition of Idenix as well as Ardea and ViroPharma, which Zwerko learned
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