SEC v. Cedric Cañas Maillard (insider trading, 2015)

Judgment entered

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The SEC's August 2015 insider trading case against former Banco Santander executive Cedric Cañas Maillard over Potash call options ended in a judgment entered on 20 August 2016 in the Southern District of New York. It was obtained on the SEC's motion for default, and orders $278,156.97 in disgorgement, $56,543.99 in interest and an $834,470.91 penalty.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$834k

Disgorgement

$278k

Prejudgment interest

$56.5k

Total relief

$1.2m

Alleged gain

$278k

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced this matter on August 13, 2015 as litigation release 23316. The respondent named is Cedric Cañas Maillard (1 individual). The new complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that Cañas coordinated with a friend to buy Potash call options in a Swiss brokerage account of which he was the sole beneficial owner, the day before Potash announced it had rejected BHP's acquisition bid, and sold them three days later for net profits of $278,156.97.

The release also recounts that Cañas had settled an earlier case over contract-for-difference trades before the same announcement, with disgorgement and a civil penalty of $960,806 each. Those figures belong to the earlier case and were wrongly shown on this record, which has been corrected.

The SEC reports that on 20 August 2016 the court entered a final judgment against Cañas on the SEC's motion for a default judgment, so the allegations were not contested. The judgment orders disgorgement of $278,156.97, the profit from the August 2010 Potash options trade, prejudgment interest of $56,543.99 and a civil penalty of $834,470.91, about $1.17 million in all. The SEC's release describes the underlying allegation, that he traded on confidential knowledge of BHP Billiton's planned bid for Potash Corporation through a Swiss account, as the SEC's allegation; a default judgment resolves the case without a trial of those facts. The release is the source for these terms; I did not open the judgment itself.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary documents linked above. This page summarises the structured record and does not reproduce them.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Insider trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2015-08-13 Litigation release published
2. 2016-08-20 Default final judgment entered against Cañas (S.D.N.Y.)

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEC litigation release
• SEC litigation release 23625 (final judgment against Cañas)

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Same matter

The library links these 2 records because they appear to concern one matter: the same lead defendant, an overlapping technique tag and close filing dates, or a shared court docket or a release that cites the other. Records are listed by date filed.

This grouping is the library's, made by matching names, techniques, dates and citations when the site is built. It is not the regulator's or a court's determination that the records are one case, and it errs towards missing a link rather than making a false one.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.