The former IBM executive who pleaded guilty in the fed’s widespread insider trading case centering on hedge fund Galleon Group says his alleged accomplice and former mistress Danielle Chiesi “played” him.
Chiesi “manipulated” or “played” Robert Moffat for tips on IBM, Lenovo Group and Advanced Micro Devices, his lawyers wrote to a federal judge in Manhattan yesterday. She had a “business model” that involved mining information from corporate execs, they said.
Moffat’s legal team asked US District Judge Deborah Batts, who is presiding over the case, to grant the 54-year-old tech executive probation rather than the six-month prison term prosecutors requested.
They said that while what he did was wrong, it wasn’t for profit — unlike the other accused parties.
Moffat met Chiesi in 2002 and “over time” their relationship became “intimate,” according to the legal team. Moffat gave Chiesi confidential information based on “a misguided desire to appear important and knowledgeable,” the lawyers said.
Moffat’s wife, who has multiple sclerosis and who married him straight out of college in 1978, told the judge she is standing by her man despite his indiscretions and also hopes the court will grant him probation.
“We are looking forward to a time when this can be put behind us,” his wife said in a letter to the judge.