Scum, through and through.

DALLAS — Sam and Charles Wyly, Dallas billionaire investors known for
their support of conservative candidates and causes, made $550 million
in undisclosed profits through 13 years of insider trading, according
to a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit filed Thursday.

In a 78-page complaint filed in a Manhattan federal court in New York,
the SEC said the Wylys held and traded tens of millions of shares in
companies on whose boards they served and "defrauded the investing
public" by misrepresenting their ownership and trading of those
stocks.

"The apparatus of the fraud was an elaborate sham system of trusts and
subsidiary companies located in the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands
.... created by and at the direction of the Wylys," the SEC complaint
stated.

Using this offshore system, the Wylys were able to sell stock worth
more than $750 million in four public companies where they served as
corporate directors. They also committed an insider trading violation
at one of the companies that resulted in an unlawful gain of over
$31.7 million, according to the complaint.

The complaint lists the four companies as Michaels Stores Inc.,
Sterling Software Inc., Sterling Commerce Inc. and Scottish Annuity &
Life Holdings Ltd., which is now known as Scottish Re Group Ltd.

"The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign
structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws," Lorin L.
Reisner, SEC deputy director of enforcement, said in a statement
Thursday. "They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions
of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for
corporate insiders."


Hopefully, they'll both end up in jail where criminals are supposed to
go.