SEC v. Roy M. Cook and others (insider trading, 2024)

Settled

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In March 2024 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Roy Cook, a former Tallgrass Energy director, and four friends, Jeffrey Natrop, Peter Renner, James Rudolph and Peter Williams, with trading on his tips ahead of the 2019 offer for Tallgrass, and charged Cook with failing to file disclosure reports on family trusts. All five agreed to settle: combined disgorgement of $701,742 and combined penalties of $1,414,684, with Cook alone agreeing to pay $801,742 in penalty and accepting an officer and director bar.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$1.4m

Disgorgement

$702k

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$2.1m

Alleged gain

$702k

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 March 12, 2024 as release LR-25948, filing in the Eastern District of Wisconsin on March 1, 2024.

The complaint alleges that Cook tipped four friends before August and December 2019 announcements about the offer for Tallgrass, and that they bought call options or shares. Cook agreed to disgorge $88,800 with $15,479 interest; Natrop, Renner, Rudolph and Williams agreed to disgorge $43,862, $13,520, $31,035 and $524,525 with interest and to pay penalties equal to those sums. The figures recorded here are the totals of the stated disgorgement and penalty amounts.

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. 2024-03-12 Litigation release published

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

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.