Massachusetts man arrested on insider trading charges

BOSTON (Reuters) - The owner of a restaurant in Massachusetts was arrested on Thursday on federal charges that he had traded on inside information obtained from an employee at VistaPrint NV and that person’s spouse about the company’s financial results.

Charlie Chen, 48, was accused in an indictment filed in federal court in Boston of making more than $800,000 from 2012 to 2014 by trading on confidential information he learned about the international printing company’s quarterly performance.

Chen was charged with three counts of securities fraud and one count of making a false statement related to a misrepresentation he had made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his trading, the indictment said.

A lawyer for Chen could not be immediately identified.

VistaPrint changed its name in 2014 to Cimpress NV. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the indictment and a related lawsuit the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed, Chen had obtained information about VistaPrint’s quarterly results from either a managerial accountant at the company or her husband.

Chen and his family socialized and went on vacations in Hawaii and Europe with the Vista employee’s family, who, like Chen, lived in Lexington, Massachusetts, the indictment said.

Chen and the VistaPrint employee’s husband in particular spoke frequently about investments in real estate and the stock market, the indictment said. It said the unnamed woman ceased to work for VistaPrint’s financial planning and analysis department in 2015.

The case is U.S. v. Chen, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, No. 18-cr-10083.