A federal judge has upheld a jury’s finding that a Massachusetts restaurateur made nearly $900,000 by using illicit insider information to trade Vistaprint stock but lowered the financial penalty that Charlie Jinan Chen must pay.

Vistaprint, a web-based seller of printed business marketing materials and promotional products, is the flagship brand of publicly traded Counselor Top 40 distributor Cimpress (asi/162149). Neither Vistaprint nor Cimpress were accused of wrongdoing.

Following the initial verdict in 2020, Chen pushed back legally, seeking a new trial on the grounds that included that the jury’s verdict was allegedly inconsistent and not supported by the weight of the evidence.

F. Dennis Saylor IV, chief U.S. District Judge for the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, ultimately ruled that the jury’s findings were proper and in accordance with the law.

Still, he reduced the civil penalty that Chen was originally ordered to pay to $892,827, which was the amount Chen allegedly gained through his shady trading. Chen had been on the hook for $1,785,654 – his ill-begotten gains times two.

Saylor gave several reasons for lowering the penalty. They included that Chen is “not a person of substantial means” and that his “violation was not substantially more egregious than a typical insider-trading violation, and he does not work in the securities industry, which perhaps marginally reduces the temptation to reoffend.”

In April 2019, a jury acquitted Chen of three criminal charges of insider trading, but declared him guilty of making a materially false statement. For the false statement conviction in the criminal case, a judge sentenced Chen to two years of probation and a small fine.

Nonetheless, his legal troubles didn’t end there. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil enforcement action against Chen.

Following a four-day trial on the civil case in 2020, the jury in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts determined that Chen was liable of violating anti-fraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Securities Act of 1933.

He faces no criminal penalty for those violations but was enjoined from committing further violations and ordered to pay the fine.

In the civil case, the jury heard that Chen was close friends with a former Vistaprint employee identified as Jenny Ye and her husband, identified as Kevin Xu. Authorities alleged that Chen leveraged these connections to obtain confidential nonpublic information about Vistaprint. He then used the information to place trades in advance of five different announcements of the company’s financial results from April 2013 through July 2014.

The jury declared that it couldn’t say definitively if it was Ye and Xu who provided information to Chen. In part, Chen based his call for a new trial on assertions that the jury found no definitive wrongdoing by Ye or Xu, but Saylor said it had been established without doubt that insider information came from at least one of them and that Chen leveraged it.

“Tips are given for personal benefit when they are given to friends as gifts,” Saylor wrote in court papers. “Furthermore, the government introduced evidence that Ye and Xu wanted to go on vacation with Chen’s family, but that Chen’s family often could not afford to vacation with them. A reasonable jury could have found, based on that evidence, that Ye or Xu disclosed material nonpublic information to Chen for a personal benefit.”