Level Global to Pay $21.5 Million to Settle S.E.C. Case

Level Global Investors, one of the largest hedge funds ensnared by the government’s insider trading crackdown, has agreed to pay more more than $21.5 million in fines and penalties to resolve its role in the investigation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Monday that Level Global, which closed in 2011 shortly after a raid by the F.B.I., had settled a lawsuit accusing the firm’s co-founder and an analyst of illegally trading in the shares of the technology companies Dell and Nvidia while in possession of secret information about them.

“The insider trading at Level Global was hardly an isolated event - it occurred repeatedly, and involved multiple companies and multiple quarterly announcements,” Sanjay Wadhwa, a senior S.E.C. lawyer in New York, said in a statement. “This settlement serves as another reminder that the SEC will hold hedge fund managers accountable when their employees violate the securities laws.”

As part of the agreement, which requires a judge’s approval, Level Global neither admits nor denies the S.E.C.’s accusations. The fund’s investors will not pay absorb any of the cost of the penalty; instead, it will be paid by the fund’s management company, which is in wind-down mode.

Level Global was once a rising force on Wall Street. Two tech-stock specialists, David Ganek and Anthony Chiasson, started the fund in 2003, splitting off from SAC Capital Advisors. SAC, the $14 billion hedge fund run by the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen, has become a focus of the government’s inquiry.

At its peak, Level Global managed about $4 billion in assets. In 2010, a unit of Goldman Sachs acquired a minority stake in Level Global. “We believe this investment by Petershill is an important milestone in the continued development of Level Global’s investment management platform as an institutional quality business,”  Mr. Ganek and Mr. Chiasson said at the time.

But just a year and a half later, the firm was dealing with the fallout of an F.B.I. raid of its Midtown Manhattan headquarters. A few months later the fund shut its doors. ”Unfortunately, the ongoing government investigation presents significant challenges to maintaining our collective focus,” wrote Mr. Ganek in a letter to his investors.

In January 2012, federal authorities charged Mr. Chiasson and a Level Global analyst, Spyridon Adondakis, and five others with participating in a “tight-knit circle of greed” that netted more than $72 million in illegal profits trading in Dell and Nvidia based on information leaked to them by company insiders. Mr. Adondakis pleaded guilty and cooperated with the government.

Mr. Chiasson denied the charges, and late last year was tried alongside another co-conspirator, Todd Newman of Diamondback Capital Management. Mr. Adondakis testified against Mr. Chiasson. A jury convicted both men. Mr. Newman is expected to be sentenced on Thursday, and Mr. Chiasson’s sentencing is scheduled for May 13.

During their trial, Judge Richard Sullivan ruled that Mr. Ganek was a co-conspirator in the case. Mr. Ganek has not been charged with a crime, and his lawyer has said there is no evidence that he knew about any inside information.