Ex-apple lawyer accused of insider trading in lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO — A former senior lawyer at Apple who oversaw the company’s insider trading policies was accused of insider trading in a federal lawsuit that was made public Wednesday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a suit that Gene Levoff, a former senior director of corporate law and a corporate secretary at Apple, repeatedly traded on inside information from 2011 to 2016.

The SEC said Levoff violated insider trading laws three times from 2015 to 2016. On one occasion, Levoff sold roughly $10 million of Apple stock — nearly his entire holdings — from his personal brokerage account four days before Apple announced quarterly earnings July 21, 2015.

The company’s stock price fell 4 percent after the earnings report, in which Apple revealed it had fallen short of analysts’ estimates for iphone sales.

Levoff had already seen a draft of the announcement and avoided about $345,000 in losses by dumping his Apple shares before the official announcement, the SEC said.

Kevin Marino, Levoff’s lawyer and a principal at Marino, Tortorella & Boyle, said he was in the process of reviewing the allegations against Levoff and looked forward to defending him.

“Gene Levoff was a trusted Apple executive for many years, and has never before been accused of wrongdoing of any kind,” Marino said.

According to the SEC, Levoff oversaw Apple’s corporate law group of 20 to 30 lawyers and paralegals. He was responsible for Apple’s compliance with securities laws and providing legal advice for the company’s SEC filings and financial reporting.

The SEC said he was placed on leave in July and terminated in September.

“After being contacted by authorities last summer, we conducted a thorough investigation with the help of outside legal experts, which resulted in termination,” an Apple spokesman, Josh Rosenstock, said.

The SEC said Levoff also engaged in insider trading on three other occasions in 2011 and 2012.