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by Mike Caswell

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has reached a $4.2-million settlement with a Ukrainian company charged as part of the newswire hacking prosecution. (All figures are in U.S. dollars.) The SEC said that the company, Concorde Bermuda Ltd., made the money as a pair of hackers stole unpublished news releases from three newswire services over a five-year period. Those wire services included Toronto's Marketwired LP.

The penalty is contained in a proposed judgment and consent document filed in New Jersey on Jan. 28, 2016. The judgment permanently bars Concorde from future violations and orders it to disgorge $4.2-million in gains. The monetary penalty will be partly satisfied with money that the SEC previously froze. In entering the settlement, Concorde has not admitted any wrongdoing.

The deal comes with several of Concorde's co-defendants awaiting trial on parallel criminal charges. Prosecutors claim that the group stole over 100,000 news releases before the items became public, with most of the items coming from Marketwired. The men frequently targeted earnings reports or other items that were likely to move a stock. The group then used those items to position themselves for profits upon the news becoming public. In one example, three of the men made $950,000 in less than an hour, prosecutors claim.

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