Insider trading suspect ‘model ethics student’
Arrest puzzles academics
BOSTON, Dec 1, (AP): Mathew Martoma knew from an early age he wanted to blend his interests in health care, business and law into a career, and he excelled as a bioethics student. Yet the 38-year-old Florida man now finds himself embroiled in what could prove one of the biggest ethical lapses in Wall Street’s history.
Federal prosecutors allege Martoma, a former hedge fund portfolio manager, persuaded a medical professor to reveal secret data from an Alzheimer’s disease drug trial. They say that allowed Martoma to engineer a record-setting insider-trading scheme that reaped more than a quarter-billion dollars in illegal profits.
Fraud
The FBI arrested Martoma on Nov 20 at his $2 million Palm Beach County home on two counts of securities fraud and a related conspiracy charge. His lawyer says there was no misuse of secret information. Phone calls by The Associated Press to listings for Martoma were not returned.
The arrest has surprised and puzzled some academics who knew Martoma before he aligned himself with a billionaire, SAC Capital Advisors hedge fund owner Steven A. Cohen. They say the criminal behavior prosecutors allege doesn’t match their memories of an intelligent, ambitious and idealistic young scholar.
“It’s sort of a tragic story it seems to me, if there’s any truth to it,” said Ronald Green, Martoma’s supervisor at the National Institutes of Health in the late 1990s, and a Dartmouth College religion professor who directs the school’s Ethics Institute.
Green backed Martoma’s hiring at NIH shortly after his Duke University graduation, and he became part of a case study about ethics and Alzheimer’s disease.
“I think one of the reasons he was brought in for this function just after college is he had very good training in bioethics and he’s a congenial person,” Green said. “He’s a guy who strikes up relationships and maintains them very well.”
The 1998 journal article that resulted listed Martoma’s name first when it published in a small health care ethics journal in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But Martoma was out of his league when it came to the other collaborators, some of whom never met him. That included Allen D. Roses, the Duke neurobiologist known for discovering the link between a gene called apolipoprotein E and Alzheimer’s disease.
Green figured the paper would help Martoma - then known as Ajai Mathew Thomas - jump-start his career. Martoma enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1997 but dropped out in 1998, soon setting his sights on business school.
Strong
Bruce Payne, a former Duke professor, stressed Martoma’s strong ethical code when he wrote a recommendation letter for his ex-pupil’s application to Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Martoma was in Payne’s ethics and policymaking class in 1994, before later becoming his chief teaching assistant for the class.
Payne, now executive director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, wrote that Martoma was “extraordinarily intelligent,” ‘’remarkably analytic” and “wonderfully fair-minded.”
“No one has contributed more to our class discussions of Sissela Bok’s ‘Lying,’ nor was anyone in our class as acute on the issues of moral capacity raised by Camus’ ‘The Plague,’” Payne told Stanford.