Ex-Apple lawyer sentenced to probation for insider trading

Apple’s former top corporate lawyer will receive no prison time after pleading guilty last year to U.S. insider trading charges, a judge said on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey, sentenced Gene Levoff to four years of probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Levoff was also ordered to pay a $30,000 fine and forfeit $604,000.

Levoff had admitted to six securities fraud counts that each carried a maximum 20-year prison term and $5 million fine.

A lawyer for Levoff, Kevin Marino, said in an email that they were “extremely pleased” for what he called a “fair and appropriate sentence of probation.”

A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

Prosecutors said Levoff exploited his roles as Apple’s corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of the company’s results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14 million of trades from 2011 to 2016.

Levoff ignored quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading before Apple’s results were released and violated the company’s broader insider trading policy that he himself was responsible for enforcing, prosecutors said.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, fired Levoff in September 2018, five months before he was criminally charged. Reuters