TL;DR
- Ross Haghighat sat on the board of directors of a biotech company called Chinook Therapeutics while it was secretly negotiating a $40/share buyout with pharmaceutical giant Novartis.
- Instead of keeping that information confidential, Haghighat leaked the tip to his brother, his stepdaughter, his employee, and his friend, all of whom bought Chinook stock before the deal went public.
- On June 12, 2023, when the acquisition was announced, Chinook’s stock surged 58% in a single day, and the family and friends cashed out for a collective $500,000+ (enough to fully pay off student loans for roughly 8 to 10 average borrowers).
- Text messages obtained by the SEC show the family coordinating the cover-up, including a $55,000 cashier’s check transferred back to Haghighat and a conversation where his stepdaughter says “delete these lol.”
- The SEC filed this lawsuit on August 22, 2025, seeking to bar Haghighat from ever serving as a corporate officer or director again, plus full disgorgement of all illicit profits.
The text messages are real, they are verbatim, and one of them ends with “delete these lol.” You will find all of them in Legal Receipts.
The Board Member Who Texted His Family a $500K Stock Tip
Filed: August 22, 2025 | Source: SEC Complaint, Case 2:25-cv-14843A corporate board member sat inside one of the most confidential deal rooms in American business, learned that a pharmaceutical giant was about to pay a 58% premium for the company he was supposed to protect, and then texted the stock ticker symbol directly to his brother.
The Setup: A Backdoor to Easy Money
Chinook Therapeutics was a Seattle-based biotech company developing precision medicines for kidney disease, and it was about to be acquired by Swiss pharmaceutical titan Novartis for up to $44 per share. That information was supposed to stay locked inside a small circle of executives, financial advisers, and board members. Ross Haghighat was one of those board members.
The negotiations began on May 4, 2023, when Novartis’s CEO called Chinook’s CEO with a verbal offer of $32 per share. That same day, Chinook’s CEO briefed the board, including Haghighat. From that moment forward, Haghighat sat in every major board meeting as the deal was negotiated, counter-offered, revised, and ultimately agreed upon at $40 per share plus contingent value rights worth up to an additional $4 per share.
Chinook maintained an explicit Insider Trading Policy. It warned covered persons: “Never buy or sell our stock when in possession of MNPI” and “Keep all MNPI confidential, including from your family and friends.” Haghighat was on the board when that policy was adopted. He knew every word of it.
Illegal Profits by Defendant — Who Got What
How He Ran the Play: Brother, Stepdaughter, Employee, Friend
Haghighat ran his insider trading operation like a family business, because it essentially was one. The SEC’s complaint documents four separate tipping chains, each activated within days of Haghighat learning new details at board meetings.
The Brother: A Children’s Trust Used as a Vehicle
Three days after the Chinook board discussed Novartis’s second offer on May 22, 2023, Bruce Haghighat emailed his broker asking to set up options trading in a trust account “ASAP.” That trust was funded by Ross Haghighat for the benefit of Ross’s own children. Bruce told the broker: “Time is of the essence. I have an opportunity transaction next week.”
On May 26, 2023, Ross texted Bruce the stock ticker “KDNY” directly. Minutes later, Bruce texted back: “Done. Let me know the exit.” Bruce bought 2,000 shares at $22.66 per share ($45,320 total), then sold on July 7, 2023, at $39 per share, generating $30,640 (roughly the cost of a year of community college tuition for five students) in illegal gains.
The Stepdaughter: Options, Debt Payoff, and a $55K Check
Ross Haghighat drove his stepdaughter Kirstyn Pearl from New York City to his Massachusetts home on May 24, 2023. Within hours of arriving, Pearl visited an options profit calculator website. She then transferred funds into her brokerage account across multiple ATM deposits in the days that followed.
Pearl purchased 153 Chinook call options with a $30 strike price and a June 16, 2023 expiration date. At the time she bought them, Chinook stock had never traded above $30 per share in its history. Buying those options with that expiration date made no sense unless you knew a massive price spike was coming in less than two weeks.
After the acquisition announcement sent the stock soaring, Pearl sold all her options between June 12 and June 14, 2023, generating $115,949 (enough to pay off the average American’s student loan debt with $57,000 left over) in illegal gains. She then paid back her student loans with the money. Ross Haghighat texted her: “Life is good. Decide how much of it you plan to save. Move it and forget it. I’m glad this worked out honey.”
Pearl subsequently wrote Ross Haghighat a cashier’s check for $55,000 drawn from her brokerage proceeds. The first check went missing. Pearl later speculated in texts to her mother that Ross had deliberately destroyed it to avoid a suspicious large bank deposit. A replacement check for $55,000 was deposited into Ross Haghighat’s account on approximately November 13, 2023.
The Employee: Liquidated Other Holdings to Fund the Trade
Fabio Sabzevari worked for Ross Haghighat at a private engineering company and scheduled Haghighat’s Chinook board meetings. He managed Haghighat’s LinkedIn profile, which listed his Chinook affiliation. He considered Haghighat a “father figure.” When the tip came, Sabzevari liquidated other stock holdings at a loss to free up trading capital, called his broker to ask how much cash he could “shove into the ATM,” and wired funds into his brokerage account for the first time ever.
Sabzevari then bought 316 out-of-the-money Chinook call options between May 26 and June 6, 2023. When the acquisition announcement dropped at 3:30 AM on June 12, 2023, Sabzevari called his broker, explained he had just learned about the deal, and then admitted to the broker that he “didn’t know anything really about options.” He walked away with $283,826 (enough to buy a median-priced home outright in dozens of American cities) in illegal profits.
Sabzevari later admitted to federal agents that Ross Haghighat told him directly to buy Chinook securities before the announcement.
The Friend: Bought Within Two Hours of a Social Visit
James Roberge and Ross Haghighat are close friends who bike together and meet for dinner regularly. On May 7, 2023, three days after Haghighat learned about Novartis’s initial offer, Haghighat visited Roberge’s house around 3:30 PM. At 5:20 PM the same day, less than two hours after that visit, Roberge placed an order to buy 500 Chinook shares. Six minutes later, he transferred $60,000 from his bank to his brokerage account.
Roberge had last traded Chinook stock in July 2021 and told his broker he did not “touch these accounts very often.” Between May 8 and June 7, 2023, he bought a total of more than 9,500 Chinook shares across two brokerage accounts. He generated $153,886 (enough to cover 20 months of the median American household’s rent) in illegal profits.
The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Measure
Every investor who bought Chinook stock through legitimate research, every retail trader who analyzed the company’s pipeline and concluded the kidney disease treatments looked promising, every ordinary person who put their 401(k) into a NASDAQ-indexed fund trusting that markets operate on fair information: they were all on the wrong side of this trade. Ross Haghighat was 62 years old, a career corporate executive with decades of experience sitting on the boards of public and private companies. He knew exactly what insider trading was. He helped write the policy against it. He voted to adopt the Code of Business Conduct that called insider trading a violation of trust. Then he picked up his phone and texted his brother the ticker.
There is a specific kind of betrayal embedded in this case that goes beyond the dollar amounts. Fabio Sabzevari was 31 years old and described Ross Haghighat as a father figure and mentor. Sabzevari had felt mistreated at Haghighat’s company, promised a raise that never materialized. The tip, then, doubled as a form of currency: a substitute for the legitimate compensation Haghighat withheld. Haghighat handed his exploited employee stolen market information instead of paying him fairly. That is the transaction underneath the transaction.
Kirstyn Pearl was 36 years old with $58,000 in student loan debt. She used her illegal gains to pay off every penny of what she owed. She described this as “what a friggin blessing to be debt free at this stage of my life.” That line hits harder when you consider that millions of Americans her age are also drowning in student loan debt, grinding through the same financial stress she felt, but without a stepfather on a corporate board willing to hand them a market tip. The relief Pearl felt is real. The fact that it came from fraud, and that it came wrapped in a $55,000 check she then had to wire back to the man who gave her the tip, makes it something darker than a windfall.
The text message chain from April 24, 2024, between Pearl and her mother, is the emotional center of this entire case. Pearl had a “brain popping realization” that Ross Haghighat may have deliberately lost the first $55,000 cashier’s check to avoid a suspicious large deposit. She theorized he had ripped it up. Her mother said she found it after. Pearl replied: “Did u????! lol that’s hilarious.” Then: “Delete these lol.” Her mother replied: “Am.” That exchange reads like a family that knows it has done something wrong and has normalized that wrongdoing enough to laugh about it on a Tuesday afternoon. The cover-up was casual. The danger was invisible to them. And they deleted the messages. The SEC found them anyway.
Legal Receipts: The Texts They Thought Would Disappear
These are verbatim excerpts from the SEC’s complaint. Every word below is drawn directly from federal court filings.
“What is the stick [sic] symbol?” — Bruce Haghighat text to Ross Haghighat, May 26, 2023
SEC Complaint — Paragraph 50–51, May 26, 2023 text exchange between brothers
“Kdny” — Ross Haghighat text reply, May 26, 2023
“Done. Let me know the exit.” — Bruce Haghighat text, after purchasing 2,000 shares
“Oh nice. Life is good. Decide how much of it you plan to save. Move it and forget it. Saving is done at the beginning, never at the end. I’m glad this worked out honey.”
SEC Complaint — Paragraph 73, Ross Haghighat text to stepdaughter Kirstyn Pearl, July 6, 2023, discussing illegal profits
“I just totally had a brain popping realization – you know how SOMEHOW a $60k check went missing on Ross’s desk – it was intentional – since it was an illegal insider trading move by him, if he had a random big deposit immediately after the sale of the company/the stock was going up, it’d be suspicious if he was ever looked into – so he made us all think we were crazy searching around the house for that [expletive] when he prob ripped it up … He always thinks he’s so friggin slick and then gets busted – I swear on my life that’s what happened.”
SEC Complaint — Paragraph 79, Kirstyn Pearl text messages to her mother, April 24, 2024
“Delete these lol” — Pearl to her mother
“Am” — Pearl’s mother in reply
“Yeah, he kinda told me, um, Novartis was buying out, um, buying out, um, this Chinook. I think it was … actually, it was at $38 a share, but they had several contingent value conditions associated with it. That increased value of it … So several things that could bump the stock up to as much as $44 a share.”
SEC Complaint — Paragraph 113, James Roberge speaking to his broker on approximately August 14, 2023, inadvertently describing the insider tip he received from Ross Haghighat
“I just don’t know anything really about options.” — Fabio Sabzevari to his broker at 3:34 AM on June 12, 2023, two and a half hours after the acquisition announcement, seeking advice on how to sell the options he had just purchased based on insider information.
SEC Complaint — Paragraph 96, Sabzevari broker call, June 12, 2023
“The bottom line is that we never buy or sell securities based on inside information, nor do we tip-off others to do so. It doesn’t matter how we learned the information – using material nonpublic information to make a trade is never acceptable. Doing so violates the law and the trust we’ve built with our fellow employees, and with our suppliers, vendors, collaborators and investors, and others.”
SEC Complaint — Paragraph 37, Chinook Therapeutics Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, the exact policy Ross Haghighat voted to adopt as a board member
The Timeline: From the First Board Meeting to the Last Deleted Text
Key Events: Chinook Acquisition and Insider Trading Timeline
The Cost of a Rigged Game
Total illegal profits extracted from the stock market by one corporate board member and his inner circle in a single scheme spanning 39 days.
That is enough to fully fund a year of college education for approximately 20 average American students, or pay the median U.S. household’s rent for over 5 years. Every dollar came from markets that regular investors trusted to be fair.
Shares of Chinook stock traded on June 12, 2023 — the day the deal went public.
On an average day in the two weeks before the announcement, 729,232 shares traded. The announcement triggered a 30x spike in volume. Every retail investor who bought those shares that morning paid a premium price that insiders had already positioned themselves to profit from.
The cashier’s check Kirstyn Pearl wrote to Ross Haghighat from her illegal options profits.
That is roughly the median annual salary of an American worker (about $56,000 in 2023). Ross Haghighat extracted it from his stepdaughter’s illegal windfall while texting her “life is good.”
Societal Impact: Who Actually Pays for Insider Trading
Economic Inequality: The Market as a Two-Tier System
Insider trading is a wealth transfer mechanism. It moves money from ordinary investors, who buy and sell based on publicly available information, to the already-connected, who buy and sell based on private information they obtained through positions of institutional trust. Every dollar that Sabzevari, Roberge, Pearl, and the Haghighat trust extracted came from the other side of their trades: retail investors, pension funds, index funds, and ordinary people whose 401(k)s hold NASDAQ-listed equities.
The scale of the advantage here was enormous. Chinook stock never traded above $30 per share before the announcement. Pearl bought options betting it would exceed $30 in less than two weeks, at a time when the company’s stock was sitting at around $24 to $25. That bet was only rational if you knew the stock was about to jump 58%. Without the tip, that trade makes no economic sense. With the tip, it was free money. The difference between those two scenarios is exactly the distance between the connected and the unconnected in American financial markets.
Roberge had not touched his Chinook position since 2021. Sabzevari had never made a wire transfer in his life before this trade. These are not sophisticated market operators who outresearched their competition. They are people who got a phone call from a board member and collected $437,712 combined (enough to purchase roughly 7 median-priced American cars, fully paid, or fund 6 years of a child’s private school education). The system did not reward their diligence. It rewarded their access.
This was the link I used to find the above legal complaint from the SEC to create this article: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2025/comp26383.pdf
The 2023 press release of the Novartis buying Chinook Therapeutics can be found here: https://www.novartis.com/news/media-releases/novartis-completes-acquisition-chinook-therapeutics
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