SEC v. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (insider trading, 2024)

Settled

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In January 2024 the Securities and Exchange Commission settled with Morgan Stanley & Co. over two Equity Syndicate Desk employees who, from June 2018 to August 2021, gave buy-side investors confidential details of impending block trades so they could short the stock first, and over the firm's failure to enforce its information barriers. Morgan Stanley agreed to a censure, $138,297,046 in disgorgement, $28,057,775 in interest and an $83 million penalty, with the disgorgement offset by sums paid under a parallel non-prosecution agreement.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$83m

Disgorgement

$138m

Prejudgment interest

$28.1m

Total relief

$249m

Alleged gain

—

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 issued this settled order on January 12, 2024 (Release No. 34-99336, File No. 3-21825).

The order finds that the desk's former head and a senior member disclosed non-public block-trade information to selected investors in breach of the selling shareholders' confidentiality expectations, and that the firm failed to enforce written policies meant to prevent misuse of material non-public information. It does not charge the two employees in this order; a separate order covers the former desk head.

Morgan Stanley consented to a cease-and-desist order and censure. Payment of the disgorgement and interest is offset by amounts paid under forfeiture or restitution orders in its non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

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. 2024-01-12 Administrative proceeding instituted (cease-and-desist)

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 order

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.

Related actions

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

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.