Merrill Contractor Faces Insider Trading Charges

The U.S. attorney’s office on Tuesday charged a former desktop publishing contractor for Merrill Lynch & Co. with insider trading for allegedly profiting from confidential merger information he learned while preparing documents there.

Prosecutors accused Min T. Ma, 28, a former employee of Bowne Business Solutions, of improperly trading in shares of SangStat Medical Corp. and Applied Molecular Evolution Inc. between June and November 2003 while working in Merrill’s offices in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, Calif.

In a separate civil lawsuit, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Ma and his girlfriend, Joyce Manni Ng, 27, another Bowne contractor working at Merrill, both reaped $438,000 in profits from trading on the nonpublic information. The SEC’s complaint also accuses Ma of trading in Oak Technology Inc. stock ahead of its announced acquisition by Zoran Corp. on May 5, 2003.

Ng and Ma spent more than double their combined incomes to buy $275,000 worth of shares in the three companies, according to the SEC. Attorneys for Ma and Ng said their clients hoped to settle the allegations.