Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., are seeking an eight-month prison sentence for a Brazilian lawyer who pleaded guilty in November to trading on inside information while he was serving as a visiting attorney at U.S. law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Romero Cabral da Costa Neto, 33, has asked for sentence of time served and supervised release, which would be suspended once he leaves the United States.
Prosecutors said Costa traded on information about drugmaker Swedish Orphan Biovitrum’s (SOBIV.ST) $1.7 billion acquisition of CTI BioPharma in May. At the time, Costa, a Brazilian national, was working as a visiting attorney in Gibson Dunn’s Washington, D.C., office under a one-year contract with the firm. Gibson Dunn advised CTI BioPharma on the deal.
Costa is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols. Costa’s lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment.
Costa was not one of the lawyers assigned to work on the deal and improperly viewed Gibson Dunn’s files related to it, prosecutors said. He purchased more than 10,000 shares of CTI on May 9, the day before the public announcement of the acquisition, and sold them the next day, making a profit of more than $42,000, prosecutors said.
The amount of money he made is “the least egregious aspect of his conduct,” prosecutors said in their Saturday sentencing memorandum. He had a special visa to work at “one of the most prestigious law firms in the world” and his salary was more than $200,000, the filing said.
Read more at
