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by Mike Caswell

Offshore hedge fund Memelland Investments Ltd., one of the many defendants in a massive newswire hacking case, denies that it did anything wrong. The firm accuses the SEC of rushing to charge it without evidence in a "shoot first" mentality. Memelland says that it never communicated with the so-called hackers or any of the other accused.

The firm is responding to a case in which the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says that a group of Ukrainian hackers targeted Toronto's Marketwired LP and two other newswire services. The group accessed 100,000 or more news releases ahead of publication, the SEC claims. The hackers then shared the releases with several traders, who used the information to make over $100-million in illegal profits, according to the SEC. (All figures are in U.S. dollars.)

Memelland's part in the scheme, as described by the SEC, was to trade based on those stolen news release. According to the regulator, Memelland placed trades in the time between the theft of the news releases and their publication. Memelland was part of a group of three entities that traded on 256 such occasions, according to the SEC. It and the other traders used middlemen and offshore entities to pay the hackers for the information, the SEC said.

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