Former Funcom CEO facing allegations of insider trading

The day before The Secret World went live, Funcom announced that their CEO Trond Aas would be stepping down from the board to serve as “Strategic Advisor to the Board and Chief Strategy Officer”.

This went unremarked at the time with the launch of The Secret World, but it has now come to light that Aas is suspected of having done this in order to remove himself from the “primary insider list” of employees, and thus be able to trade in his Funcom shares without official scrutiny.

Aas reportedly attemped to sell 1.5 million of his shares in Funcom in secret, before being noticed by another stockholder and publicly outed. Funcom’s share prices later tanked on the back of poor sales of The Secret World, tumbling from a high of $17 to the $2 they are worth today.

Although Aas was able to sell 650,000 of his shares, he is now under investigation by the Oslo Stock Exchange and Norway’s Financial Services Authority. Aas insists that he had every reason to believe the game would be a success at the time he sold his shares, and is denying any wrongdoing.

Source: The Escapist