''Mark Cuban violated the law, and he knew better,'' Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer Jan Folena said Tuesday during opening statements to jurors at Cuban's insider-trading trial.
One of Cuban's lawyers said that the SEC's chief witness was lying, and portrayed the case as government overreach.
Cuban ''is going to stand up to them when they call him a liar, he's going to stand up to them when they call him a cheat,'' said the lawyer, Thomas Melsheimer. The government, he said, ''can't prove a lick'' of its case.
It's a civil lawsuit; Cuban is not charged with a crime. The SEC wants Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a regular on the ABC reality show ''Shark Tank,'' to give up $750,000 he saved from selling his shares, plus pay a penalty that could be two or three times that amount.
The SEC alleges that Cuban promised not to trade on information he learned in 2004 from the CEO of Mamma.com, a Canadian search-engine company of which Cuban owned 6 percent of all shares. The company planned a stock offering that would reduce the value of existing shares. Cuban broke his vow and sold, the agency says.
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