New York GOP Rep. Chris Collins, center, walks out of a courthouse on Aug. 8 following his indictment on insider trading charges.
A member of Congress under indictment for alleged insider trading in an Australian biotechnology firm has restarted his reelection campaign, according to a news report.
Citing four unnamed sources familiar with the situation, The Buffalo News reported that Republican Rep. Chris Collins of New York will remain on the ballot despite being under indictment, as his attorneys fear the Democrats could use election laws to challenge him should he remove his name. Collins represents a district near the cities of Buffalo and Rochester.
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“Because of the protracted and uncertain nature of any legal effort to replace Congressman Collins, we do not see a path allowing Congressman Collins to be replaced on the ballot,” his attorney, Mark Braden, wrote in a statement, responding MedCity News’s request for comment to Collins’s office.
Collins initially dropped his reelection bid last month following his arrest by the FBI on insider trading charges related to his membership on the board of directors of Innate Immunotherapeutics, based in Melbourne, Australia. Collins had already been under investigation due to his ownership of a stake in the company.
It is alleged that Collins obtained negative results from a Phase IIb clinical trial of Innate’s lead drug candidate in secondary progressive multiple sclerosis and the passed them along to his son, who sold nearly 1.4 million shares over several days before the results were made public. In addition to the elder and younger Collins, Stephen Zarsky – the father of Cameron Collins’s fiancee – is also named. The fiancee and five others are listed as unnamed co-conspirators. Cameron Collins had held a 2.3 percent stake in Innate, while his father held a 16.8 percent stake. In total, those in the indictment allegedly avoided $768,000 in losses they would have incurred had they waited until the results became public.
Collins’s attorneys noted at the time that Collins himself did not trade any shares of Innate. However, MedCity News’s sister publication, Above the Law, noted that Collins did not need to trade any shares himself to have committed insider trading. After Innate received the results of the Phase IIb trial, the Australian Stock Exhange – where Christopher Collins’s shares were held – halted trading of its shares at the company’s request, but they continued trading on the over-the-counter market in the US, where Cameron Collins had his shares.
Photo: Spencer Platt, Getty Images
