Croatian seamstress in $2.83 mln accord with SEC

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Thursday September 02, 2010 01:41:23 AM GMT

* Anticevic gives up rights to escrowed funds

* Earlier $5.72 mln judgment had been thrown out

NEW YORK, Aug 31 (Reuters) - A retired Croatian seamstress implicated in a U.S. insider-trading ring has agreed to give up her rights to $2.83 million held in a court-controlled account, as part of a final judgment with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sonja Anticevic accepted the accord without admitting wrongdoing, according to the judgment approved Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan. The $2.83 million includes $2.06 million of improper profits, plus interest.

The civil settlement resolves one portion of the unusual case. Prosecutors had in 2005 accused Anticevic of holding two brokerage accounts in her name that her nephew, David Pajcin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc analyst, used for trades that generated $6.7 million in illegal profits.

Anticevic is believed to be in her late 60s and living on a low income in Croatia, and the SEC has said the $2.83 million was likely all it could recover from her.

Wood in May threw out a $5.72 million default judgment against Anticevic, citing the defendant's unfamiliarity with U.S. courts and her defense that she had no reason to know her nephew was conducting illegal trading.

Pajcin in 2006 pleaded guilty to running the insider trading ring, but fled while on probation. In June, Wood ordered him to pay $27.8 million, including fines.

Ante Madunic, a lawyer for Anticevic, could not immediately be reached for comment. Scott Black, a lawyer for the SEC, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Prosecutors said the ring traded on leaks about mergers, market-moving media reports and a grand jury probe involving the drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.

People who leaked information included a Merrill Lynch & Co analyst, workers at a printing plant for BusinessWeek magazine, and a New Jersey postal worker who sat on the grand jury.

The case is SEC v. Anticevic et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 05-06991. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Todd Eastham)

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