Cohen to Present on SAC Call, Take No Questions
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Investors in the embattled hedge-fund SAC Capital are gathering Wednesday morning for an 8 a.m. briefing on the firm's current legal issues.
Company founder Steve Cohen, who has kept largely silent up to now, will participate in the call, say two people familiar with the matter, but SAC management will field no questions, one of these people added.
The call is expected to be brief, says this person – no more than fifteen to twenty minutes. (Read More: SAC Capital to Hold Investor Call Wednesday Morning)
The $14 billion hedge-fund company was thrown into the spotlight last week amid Department of Justice allegations that a former SAC trader named Matthew Martoma had used illegally —obtained information to make a series of lucrative sales of two pharmaceutical stocks in 2008. Martoma, according to the complaint, briefed the hedge fund's owner — a party widely assumed to be Cohen — before the sales occurred, and the owner signed off on the decision.
In a statement last week, Cohen said that he and SAC have behaved appropriately and that both parties are cooperating with the insider-trading probe, which has now lasted several years. (Read More: Former SAC Fund Manger Has Been Set at $5 Million)
Nonetheless, some SAC investors have grown leery of the firm now that Cohen appears to be personally entangled in the trading controversy. Last week, one money manager filed notice of its plan to redeem capital after some of its clients aired concerns about the future of SAC, someone familiar with the situation has said.
And this week, other wealthy individual investors have expressed similar fears to their brokers about whether the government insider-trading probe could run SAC out of business, the brokers said. At least one of those investors is considering redeeming money as well. (Read More: Investor: I'm Pulling Out of SAC as Insider Probe Widens)
The Justice Department's Martoma case, filed Nov. 20 alongside a parallel civil case from the Securities and Exchange Commission, fell too late for SAC investors to redeem capital this year. The next redemption opportunity falls in February, say people familiar with the firm's policies, at which point SAC will take requests to return investor capital by the first quarter's end.
Even a slew of outside investor redemptions wouldn't reduce SAC's assets too dramatically, however, since Cohen and other insiders together provide more than $8 billion of the total $14 billion under management.
—By CNBC's Kate Kelly; Follow her on Twitter @KateKellyCNBC
