The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged executives of Cheetah Mobile Inc. with insider trading for selling Cheetah Mobile’s securities through a trading plan that withheld “a material negative revenue trend.”
According to the SEC order on Sept. 21, Sheng Fu, the company’s CEO, and Ming Xu, its then-president and chief technology officer, jointly established a purported 10b5-1 trading plan after becoming aware of a significant drop in advertising revenues from the company’s largest advertising partner.
The company earned up to one-third of its revenues by placing within its applications third-party advertisements provided by its largest advertising partner, said the order….