They need to face criminal charges and jailed, as its hard to fathom that this is just a coincidence. Its grabbed the attention of American politicians. Tweet— Twitter API (@user) date
It doesn't make a lot of sense to be fair. The CFO should know that something like that would get found out. His compensation last year was $2.4mil and assuming the share price dip in after hours trading is the worst of it, he has "saved" himself about $140k. That's such a fecking awful risk/reward ratio when you consider what he makes in a year. Now I've looked, early August was actually a 1 year high for the stock.
Even if the stock was at a 1 year high, that doesn't excuse their behaviour and get them off the hook. Its hard to fathom that 3 senior employees coincidentally sold their shares worth nearly $1.8 million, before the company publicly announced they suffered a massive security breach. Edit - The company is now denying that the 3 employees knew about the hack when they sold their shares, which is rather convenient when you consider these were senior employees.
You're making quite a few jumps there. I work in cyber security for a bank so have a bit of understanding of how these things tend to go. They discovered an intrustion on July 29th, that doesn't mean that they knew how much/what kind of data had been compromised at that point, that takes some investigation and analysis which usually takes time, which explains the lag between them knowing and the announcement. While that is ongoing it is pretty much treated as being on a need to know basis, typically those working on it, their boss etc in a chain up to the CEO. I'd be surprised if the CFO was not informed, but I see no reason why the president of information solutions and paticularly the president of workforce would be. Senior employees sell stock all the time and it's not a surprise to see sales around a 1Y high, without something concrete like them being in an email chain, attending a meeting where it was discussed etc it means feck all on its own. It's something that should be looked into, sure, but that alone is in no way proof of anything.
No surprise that an investigation has been launched. Though as @IWat notes in the above post, it may well be that these shares were sold before these employees found out about the breach and its related the share price being at a 1 year high. Key questions for the investigators will be 1) Whether the 3 employees took action to sell the shares after being made aware of a security breach 2) Were the share sales already planned before the intrusion was discovered Tweet— Twitter API (@user) date
