With the Dallas Mavericks having a subpar season, it is unlikely that the basketball team’s charismatic owner, Mark Cuban, will find himself court side during the N.B.A. finals in June.
But with a judge’s ruling on Tuesday, Mr. Cuban will have his hands full during the playoffs.
A federal judge in Dallas denied a request by Mr. Cuban to dismiss a nearly five-year-old insider-trading lawsuit brought against him by federal securities regulators. A trial is scheduled for June.
Judge Sidney Fitzwater decided that the Securities and Exchange Commission‘s civil action against Mr. Cuban could proceed to trial. Mr. Cuban has maintained that he has done nothing wrong.
The S.E.C. filed a civil lawsuit against Mr. Cuban in 2008, accusing him of trading on confidential information when he sold his stake in Mamma.com, a small Internet search company, in June 2004, just before it announced news that caused its stock price to plummet.
Mamma.com’s chief executive had asked Mr. Cuban, who already owned about 6 percent of the company, if he was interested in participating in a new share offering. Mr. Cuban, according to the S.E.C., declined. The commission says that the next day, Mr. Cuban dumped all of his shares, avoiding a $750,000 loss.
The S.E.C. said that Mr. Cuban knew or was reckless in not knowing that he had received confidential information about Mamm! a.com. (Mamma.com, based in Canada, has since change its name to Copernic.)
Mr. Cuban, famous for mixing it up with referees during Mavericks games, mounted an aggressive defense. His lawyers have argued, among other things, that the insider trading laws did not prohibit him from selling his stock.
Mr. Cuban also accused the S.E.C. of acting with bias in bringing the case against him. But last year, the S.E.C. inspector general â€" an internal watchdog for the agency â€" cleared the agency of any misconduct.
Judge Fitzwater originally threw out the lawsuit in 2009, but a federal appeals court reversed and sent the case back down to him. In his decision issued Tuesday, Judge Fitzwater said the case was “in some respects a close one,†but that the S.E.C. was entitled to present its case to a jury.
“We respect Judge Fitzwater’s decision,†wrote Christopher J. Clark of Latham & Watkins and Stephen Best of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, in an e-mailed statement. “Judge Fitzwter was constrained by governing law to accept as true, evidence that the Judge himself explained is incomplete and flawed, and we very much look forward to trial where we will demonstrate that the S.E.C.’s ‘evidence’ is nothing but fabrication and speculation.â€
This summer is shaping up to be a busy one for the S.E.C. Already on the docket for mid-July is the trial of Fabrice Tourre, the former Goldman Sachs Group executive facing civil charges brought by the commission that relate to the bank’s sale of a complex mortgage-backed security called Abacus.
