Longtime Boca Raton resident and hedge funder Leon Cooperman has just been charged with pocketing $4 million in fraudulent profits and trying to cover it up.
According to the Security and Exchange Commission, who charged him yesterday, in 2011 Cooperman got inside information from an Atlas Pipeline executive that the company was planning to sell a natural gas processing plant in Oklahoma.
Cooperman, 73, runs Omega Advisors, a big investor in Atlas, was told not to trade on the information, but he did anyway, according to the New York Post.
Is it possible that Cooperman’s wealth, estimated at $3.1 billion, which makes him the 182nd richest man on the Forbes 400, wasn’t quite enough for him!
According to the SEC complaint, once Cooperman, who had formerly dogged Atlas, heard about the pending sale, he began snatching up Atlas stock, bonds and options.
When the deal was announced later that month, the stock Cooperman had bought was up 31 percent.
