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...their colleagues -- in fact, their deep, dark secret -- was the amount of time they spent in frequent, terse phone conversations. Last week the subject of their calls became the stuff of scandal when the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Vaskevitch, 36, the head of international mergers in Merrill Lynch's London office, and Sofer, 46, an Israeli stock speculator, with ringing up more than $4 million in illegal profits from a transatlantic insider-trading scheme...
...Merrill Lynch mergermaker, Vaskevitch was in a prime position to know about any takeover deal being planned by one of the giant investment house's clients. The SEC says Vaskevitch illegally passed such tips to Sofer, who then arranged to buy the takeover stocks through two Wall Street brokerage firms, MKI Securities and Russo Securities, neither of which has been charged with wrongdoing. The profits from the trades returned in a roundabout way to Vaskevitch and Sofer through two intermediate companies, situated in England and Liechtenstein, in which Sofer held an interest, the SEC claims...
Vaskevitch and Sofer allegedly used their setup to profit from at least twelve deals involving Merrill Lynch clients. Vaskevitch worked directly on one of them, the purchase in March 1986 of Herman's Sporting Goods by Britain's Dee Corp., which the SEC says produced a profit of $263,988 for the two suspects. Their biggest haul was K mart's 1985 takeover of Pay Less Drug ! Stores Northwest, which the SEC contends brought them nearly $1.2 million...
Even so, the charges may have already shattered the careers of the two cosmopolitan go-getters. Merrill Lynch promptly fired Vaskevitch, citing his failure to give the company an explanation of the SEC's charges. The son of a wealthy Israeli tobacco trader, Vaskevitch had already risen to head a merger operation for a British investment house by age 30, when he joined Merrill Lynch in 1981. He quickly became Merrill's top international mergermaker and lived accordingly in a $2.4 million London home filled with antique furniture...
...Merrill Lynch last week's accusations were a shock, even though the company was not accused of making any profits from the alleged insider dealing. It was still an end of innocence, since Vaskevitch was the firm's first investment banker to get caught up in the insider-trading scandals. Moreover, the involvement of so high an executive in the largest U.S. brokerage firm sent new waves of shivers through Wall Street. According to the rumor mill, which is now more preoccupied with subpoenas than proxy statements, as many as 60 Wall Streeters will be accused in connection with...