A federal jury in Boston this week ruled that a Massachusetts restaurateur made more than $800,000 by using illicit insider information to trade Vistaprint stock illegally.

Vistaprint, a primarily web-based seller of printed business marketing materials and promotional products, is the largest division of Top 40 promo products distributor Cimpress (asi/162149).  Neither Vistaprint nor Cimpress was accused of or implicated in any wrongdoing.

Following a four-day trial, the jury in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts determined that Charlie Jinan Chen was liable of violating antifraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Securities Act of 1933.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking the disgorgement of Chen’s insider trading profits. The SEC could also pursue civil penalties of up to three times the amount of the money Chen raked in through insider trading.

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 highly 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 were feeding information to Chen, but noted that the information came from one of them. Ye has not worked at Vistaprint since 2015, authorities said.

The trial and verdict rendered on Feb. 3 were connected with a suit the SEC had filed and only addressed liability in the Chen case, which prosecutors characterized as complex. 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, U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper sentenced Chen to two years of probation and a small fine.

The false statement criminal conviction was a result of Chen initially lying to authorities about his friendship with Xu. He told investigators that he and Xu were not good friends, even though the men and their families went on vacations together and sent their children to the same Chinese Sunday school.