Collins, a former member of the Innate Immunotherapeutics Board of Directors, was indicted in 2018 and resigned his seat last year.
The judicial hammer will fall later today on former U.S. Rep. Chris Collins who pleaded guilty to charges of insider trading in October. Collins, a former member of the Innate Immunotherapeutics Board of Directors, was indicted in 2018 and resigned his seat last year.
Collins will appear before U.S. Judge Vernon Broderick in federal court in New York City this afternoon for his sentencing. According to CNBC, federal prosecutors are seeking up to five years in prison, which is the high end of the federal sentencing guidelines. Their reason is to promote respect for the law, in light of the lack of respect that Collins has shown for it,” CNBC said.
However, Collins’ own attorneys are seeking a lighter sentence, including probation, due to the “shame” that Collins has already endured. In a filing ahead of the sentencing, one of Collins’ attorneys said the disgraced congressman has “paid a heavy price for his crimes” and is “… too ashamed to spend significant time in the community he loves,” CNBC said.
Probation officers, CNBC added, recommend a sentence of one year and a day in prison and a $200,000 fine.
Collins pleaded guilty to using information he learned as a board member of Innate Immunotherapeutics to have his son, Cameron, make timely trades on the stock market. According to the federal indictment against the former congressman, Collins “passed nonpublic information” about Innate’s drug trials to his son in order to help him “make timely trades in Innate stock and tip others.” As BioSpace previously reported, the indictment specifically pointed to a 2017 trial failure that caused company stock to plunge about 90% in one day. Collins did not unload his own stock ahead of the public announcement, which he knew about due to a telephone call from the company’s chief executive officer, and was reported to have lost about $16 million that day. His holdings having been pegged at being worth about $45.5 million at the time. In addition to tipping his son, information was also sent to his fiancée’s father, Stephen Zarsky. With a 17% stake in Innate, Collins was the largest shareholder of the company. Combined with investments made by his family that control jumped to about 21%.
Cameron Collins is expected to be sentenced Jan. 23 and Zarsky will be in court the next day to learn of his own fate.
During his time on Innate’s board of directors, Collins was known to urge members of his caucus and circle of friends to invest in Innate. In 2017 it was reported that Collins bragged about how many millionaires he had made of people due to their investments in Innate.
Innate Immunotherapeutics has changed its name to Amplia Therapeutics since the Collins news broke two years ago as part of a “branding refresh” to show the company’s focus on the “development of a pipeline of Focal Adhesion Kinase (FAK) inhibitors for cancer and fibrosis.”
