Former Rep. Stephen Buyer (R-Ind.), 64, was sentenced in New York to nearly two years in prison on Tuesday for insider trading.
The nine-term former congressman was sentenced to 22 months in prison for trading inside information he learned as consultant ahead of two separate companies mergers.
After leaving office in 2011, Buyer worked as a corporate consultant. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams convicted and sentenced Buyer.
“He abused positions of trust for illicit personal gain, and today he faced justice for those acts,” Williams wrote in a statement released Tuesday. “No insider trader is above the law, and we will continue to bring those who undermine the fairness and integrity of our markets to justice.”
In March, Buyer was convicted on four counts of misappropriating non-public information for his former consulting clients.
In July 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Buyer and nine others with insider trading. The SEC alleged that Buyer used the information he gained as a consultant for personal gain. Authorities said that Buyer obtained $568,000 in Sprint shares in 2018 after finding out that the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile was planned.
T-Mobile was a client of Buyer’s consulting firm, the Steve Buyer Group. According to evidence presented during trial, Buyer engaged in two separate, interrelated insider trading deals to “place timely, profitable securities trades based on that stolen information.”
In 2019, Buyer traded shares of Navigant Consulting group ahead of the organization’s acquisition by Guidehouse. Evidence presented in court found that Buyer made “more than $223,000 from his illegal Navigant trades.”
When Buyer testified in March 2023, he provided false explanations for his trades. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman found Buyer’s statements to constitute an obstruction of justice.
Buyer was ordered to pay more than $350,000 in forfeiture and restitution.
