SEC v. Fishoff, et al. (insider trading, 2018)

Alleged — pending

These are allegations. SEC has filed an action; nothing in it has been proven, and the respondents have not been found liable. Everything described on this page is what the regulator alleges, not what a court has found. See our editorial policy.

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 4, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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In August 2018 the SEC charged former Sangamo executive Winson Tang, tip seller Deshan Govender and day trader Steven Fishoff over trades ahead of Sangamo's Biogen licensing announcement, which produced about $1.5 million in profits. Tang settled in June 2019 with a $750,000 penalty and Govender consented to an injunction, but the SEC's claims against Fishoff were still pending in the latest release found, so the record stays at filed.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

$1.5m

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 SEC alleged that Tang tipped his friend Govender, who sold non-public information to traders, and that Govender passed it to Fishoff and others in his ring, who bought stock and options before the January 2014 announcement. The complaint asked for disgorgement, interest, penalties and injunctions. Fishoff and four associates had earlier been charged over trades before secondary offerings; all pleaded guilty in parallel criminal cases.

An SEC litigation release of June 2019 shows a partial outcome. On 3 June 2019 the Southern District of New York entered a consent judgment against Tang, without admission or denial, enjoining him, imposing a $750,000 civil penalty and a five-year officer-and-director bar, which the SEC says fully resolves the case against him. On 4 June 2019 it entered a consent judgment enjoining Govender, with monetary relief left for the court to decide on a later SEC motion. The release says the claims against Fishoff and the other defendants remained pending. We checked the SEC's litigation releases and administrative proceedings on 2026-10-04 and found nothing later, so the status stays filed and the money fields are left empty because the Tang penalty is only one defendant's share.

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. 2018-08-23 Litigation release published
2. 2019-06-03 Consent judgment against Tang ($750,000 penalty, five-year officer-and-director bar); Govender consent injunction follows on 4 June

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 LR-24498 (Tang and Govender judgments)

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 3 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. If this matter has since resolved, been withdrawn or been dismissed, we want to know: submit a correction.