“
‘I never traded on confidential coronavirus information. … But to end the distraction, my family will divest from individual stocks.’
”
That line is culled from the headline and secondary headline on a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican from Georgia who has faced accusations of insider trading for her stock sales after a private, all-senators briefing in late January on the coronavirus.
She’s now trying to tamp down the uproar over the portfolio moves — she also bought shares of a company whose product is instrumental in allowing many people to work from home weeks before much of America was advised to do so — with her op-ed piece, which appeared on Wednesday.
Senate Republicans have become worried that the outcry is hurting her election chances in November, wrote Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jim Galloway in an attention-grabbing piece published Tuesday.
In her column, Loeffler repeated a past assertion that third-party advisers buy and sell stocks on her family’s behalf.
“Based on contemporaneous reporting and public statements by the officials who provided the briefing, there was no material or non-public information discussed,” she wrote.
The senator added that “although Senate ethics rules don’t require it, my husband and I are liquidating our holdings in managed accounts and moving into exchange-traded funds and mutual funds.”
Loeffler is married to the CEO and chairman of Intercontinental Exchange Inc.
ICE,
the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company. Loeffler, who formerly worked for the same company, was gubernatorially appointed to the Senate seat in December and has never faced voters.
U.S. stocks
DJIA,
SPX,
have tumbled from their mid-February record levels on coronavirus-related worries, though the main equity gauges lately have mounted a comeback and are holding above a March 23 low.
Source : MTV
