The Powers that Be tried to hide the story of the insider trading case against an Information Technology guy at Montreal law firm Ogilvy Renault LLP from me by having all of the press reports written in French. Undeterred, I have unearthed the one English language version (here, from the Montreal Gazette) to get the details.

In a press release earlier this week (more French), Quebec regulator Autorité de marches financier (AMF) announced that Dominic Côté, a former IT specialist with Ogilvy Renault, has pleaded guilty to 14 charges: "13 involving stock transactions based on privileged information and one charge for having shared insider information." He also agreed to pay $1.26 million in fines - about twice the illegal profit he made. The AMF alleges that by virtue of his position in the firm, Côté was able to obtain insider information from Ogilvy's computers, and he used the information to buy stock in 13 publicly traded companies.

In October 2009, a former associate at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell pleaded guilty in a criminal case where he admitted to similarly obtaining inside information from his firm’s computer systems. In that case, the attorney used temporary passwords issued by night-time secretaries to mine electronic data on the firm’s computer.