“To his credit, Mr. Cohen has accepted responsibility for his conduct and will thereby avoid a trial,” Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Ben Brafman, said in a statement. As a French citizen, Mr. Cohen could face deportation.

Mr. Cohen’s plea agreement doesn’t require him to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors said Mr. Cohen was one of several investment-bank insiders involved in the alleged insider-trading ring, which authorities say yielded tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits. In indictments and related court filings, prosecutors and investigators have laid out interconnected conspiracies in which traders around the world profited from inside information drawn from middlemen, corporate insiders and bankers, related to major corporate deals involving publicly traded companies.

Several of those charged remain at large. Mr. Cohen was arrested but had been released on bail in New York.

The Switzerland-based trader wasn’t identified in the indictment against Mr. Cohen, but according to people familiar with the investigation and court filings the trader is Marc Demane Debih, who is now a cooperating witness for the government. Mr. Demane was arrested in Serbia in 2018 and extradited to the U.S. last year. He has pleaded guilty to a 38-count indictment and is cooperating with prosecutors, according to court filings and trial proceedings.

Mr. Demane is being held at a Manhattan detention facility, and on Tuesday afternoon took the witness stand in a criminal trial, in a separate criminal case, that resulted from the same investigation that led to charges against Mr. Cohen.

Mr. Cohen worked as an associate at Goldman in London before moving to New York as a vice president for the bank. Prosecutors alleged that between 2015 and 2017 Mr. Cohen gave inside information about Goldman clients to Mr. Demane, who made profitable trades on the information. In exchange, they said, Mr. Demane gave Mr. Cohen benefits, including cash.

The count to which Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday related to a potential acquisition of restaurant chain Buffalo Wild Wings Inc., which was a Goldman client. In his plea, Mr. Cohen admitted that in October 2017 he gave privileged information about the potential acquisition to Mr. Demane so Mr. Demane could trade on it.

A spokeswoman for Goldman declined to comment but confirmed Mr. Cohen is no longer employed at the bank.

Mr. Cohen entered his plea in federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, just two floors above the courtroom where Mr. Demane took the witness stand later Tuesday.

The defendant on trial in that case, Telemaque Lavidas, is accused of leaking inside information about a publicly traded biotech company to a Greek securities trader, who shared the information with Mr. Demane and others.

Dressed in navy prison scrubs, Mr. Demane began his testimony by describing his arrest and cooperation agreement, which requires him to turn over $49 million in illegal profits to the government. He also began to describe to the jury how he used inside information from an array of sources to make profitable stock trades, and techniques he used to conceal the true motivation of his trades. He is expected to resume testimony Wednesday morning.

FONTE: WALLSTREET JOURNAL

FOTO: Bryan Cohen leaving federal court in New York in October Photo: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg News