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Mum’s the word for SAC Capital’s Steve Cohen.
The hedge fund billionaire invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself when called by Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara to testify before a grand jury criminal probe, according to a report.
The probe into SAC’s insider trading resulted in subpoenas of the billionaire and four other SAC employees, sources said.
The FBI has been investigating Cohen and others at SAC for years.
The investor has not been charged with any crimes and maintains his innocence.
As many as nine current and former SAC employees have been implicated or charged with insider trading while working at the Stamford, Conn., fund.
Included in that count is Mathew Martoma, a former SAC trader, indicted last year. Martoma is the closest the feds have gotten to Cohen.
To indict Cohen or other SAC employees on charges related to Martoma’s trades, Bharara faces a July 29 deadline based on a five-year statute of limitations.
Martoma is charged with helping Cohen and SAC earn a whopping $276 million trading two drug stocks on illegal tips from a doctor overseeing clinical drug trials. Prosecutors have said Cohen participated in the trades.
Bharara and his fellow prosecutors “are not buying into the statute of limitations” in the SAC case, a person close to Bharara’s thinking told The Post earlier this month.
Indeed, the prosecutor has been looking at different strategies that could allow them to bypass the five-year deadline for insider trading, including a hub-and-spoke conspiracy theory.
Under this theory, prosecutors could extend their legal reach if they prove a more recent insider-trading case, as long as all the cases go back to the same hub, such as Cohen.
Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for SAC Capital, declined to comment on whether Cohen took the Fifth, which was first reported by Bloomberg.
Jerika Richardson, a spokeswoman for Bharara, also declined to comment.
Cohen would be wise to keep his lips sealed given his past testimony on insider trading.
In 2011, Cohen gave several days of sworn testimony in a civil-fraud case brought by Canadian insurer Fairfax, which sued SAC and other firms for allegedly conspiring to drive down its share price.
The case was dismissed due to a lack of evidence, but the testimony offers a rare look into Cohen’s views on regulatory rules against illegal trading, which he called “vague.”
Cohen also said he doesn’t expect his employees to follow the company’s internal compliance manual to the letter.
“It depends on the circumstance,” he said when asked whether it was “legal or illegal to trade on material nonpublic information.”
“So there are circumstances, in your view, in which it is legal . . . to trade on the basis of material, nonpublic information?” asked Fairfax ’s lawyer, Michael Bowe.
“Yes,” Cohen said.