The Goldman/Merrill Insider Trading Scandal

Wall Street Folly and Deal Breaker own the Goldman Sachs/Merrill Lynch insider trading story. Wall Street Folly even scooped the New York Post.
It turns out that Gene Plotkin, the 26-year-old (alleged) criminal mastermind, is also a novelist, filmmaker and competitive ballroom dancer.
Well…Plotkin isn’t the only dancer involved. According to today’s New York Times:

A dancer, Monika Vujovic, 23, of New York, allowed the defendants to set up an account for her in which illegal trades were made, according to the S.E.C. complaint, which charges her. Her lawyer, Mel A. Sachs, said he was confident that the accusations against his client would be favorably resolved in court.

The Times being the Times, of course, calls her a “dancer.” The Times of London, however, is a little less delicate and calls her “a stripper.” Apparently, strippers were to be a key element of insider trading scheme. According to the SEC:

Plotkin and Pajcin also contemplated various schemes involving exotic dancers, including having them garner information from bankers while dancing, and using them to induce investment bankers to provide Plotkin and Pajcin with information.

I did a little searching and here’s a picture I found from the Tesla Memorial Society of New York‘s Web site.

Monika Vujovic is, as you may have guessed, the one in the center. To her right is the ambassador from Serbia-Montenegro. Come to think of it, the Balkans may be the key to this whole case. According to the NYT:

(I)t was $2 million in profits made by a 63-year-old retired seamstress in Croatia that tipped off the Securities and Exchange Commission about an ambitious and unusually creative insider trading ring, investigators say. That lead culminated in the arrests yesterday of two junior-level employees at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.
The seamstress, Sonja Anticevic, made more than $2 million — a seventeenfold return — on a two-day investment in options on Reebok International after the company announced last August it would be acquired by Adidas-Salomon and the stock surged 30 percent.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on April 13th, 2006 at 12:01 pm

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