Tag Archives: Securities and Exchange Commission

Pfizer CEO made $5.6 million stock sale on same day as COVID-19 vaccine update: filing

(Reuters) – Pfizer Inc Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla sold $5.56 million worth of company shares on Monday, the day the drugmaker said its COVID-19 vaccine was 90% effective based on interim trial results, a regulatory filing showed.

Bourla authorized the sale of the shares on Aug. 19, provided the stock was at least at a certain price, as part of a predetermined plan, the company said.

Bourla sold 132,508 shares at $41.94 per share, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late Tuesday.

“The sale of these shares is part of Dr. Bourla’s personal financial planning and a pre-established (10b5-1) plan, which allows, under SEC rules, major shareholders and insiders of exchange-listed corporations to trade a predetermined number of shares at a predetermined time,” Pfizer said.

Pfizer said on Monday its experimental COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective based on initial trial results, sending its shares higher along with the broader markets.

The company’s shares rose as much as 15% to trade at session high of $41.99 on Monday, before closing up 7.7%. They were trading at 38.75 on Wednesday.

Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE have said no serious safety concerns were found so far and expect to seek U.S. emergency use authorization this month, raising the chance of a regulatory decision as soon as December.

(Reporting by Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Shounak Dasgupta)

Exclusive: U.S. Homeland Security found SEC had ‘critical’ cyber weaknesses in January

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission logo adorns an office door at the SEC headquarters in Washington, June 24, 2011.

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security detected five “critical” cyber security weaknesses on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s computers as of January 23, 2017, according to a confidential weekly report reviewed by Reuters.

The report’s findings raise fresh questions about a 2016 cyber breach into the SEC’s corporate filing system known as “EDGAR.” SEC Chairman Jay Clayton disclosed late Wednesday night that the agency learned in August 2017 that hackers may have exploited the 2016 incident for illegal insider-trading.

The January DHS report, which shows its weekly findings after scanning computers for cyber weaknesses across most of the federal civilian government agencies, revealed that the SEC at the time had the fourth most “critical” vulnerabilities.

It was not clear if the vulnerabilities detected by DHS are directly related to the cyber breach disclosed by the SEC in 2016.

But it shows that even after the SEC says it patched “promptly” the software vulnerability after the 2016 hack, critical vulnerabilities still plagued the regulator’s systems.

An SEC spokesman did not have any immediate comment on the report’s findings.

It is unclear if any of those critical vulnerabilities still pose a threat.

(This version of the story was refiled to correct day of the week in paragraph 2)

 

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Nick Zieminski)