How much does it cost to get hold of insider information about an unreleased device from Apple? Apparently no more than two hundred bucks per hour of “work”. Apple’s supplier of camera and battery components Flextronics has found itself in the middle of an international scandal involving its director Walter Shimoon who was busted leaking information pertaining to iPhone sales and the then unreleased iPad. His indictment, leaked by The Wall Street Journal, reveals he leaked trade secrets to a New York-based hedge fund called Kingdom Ridge Capital.
The juicy stuff included quarterly sales figures two and a half weeks ahead of Apple’s quarterly earnings release. Don’t for a second think that the fund didn’t use this knowledge data in order to manipulate stock – they profited a cool $560,000 in October of 2009 by taking advantage of the secrets Shimoon leaked. Philip Elmer-DeWitt scavenged court documents unsealed yesterday and published a nice summary on the Fortune blog. From FBI’s tapping records of Shimoon’s conversations with a Kingdom Ridge Capital person:
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