H.J. Heinz Co. CEO William Johnson, left, and 3G Capital Managing Partner ... more >First the SEC, now the FBI. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway fund, which bought Heinz last week for $23 billion, is under a cloud of investigation for suspicious trade deals that were tracked in the lead-up to the purchase.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a Feb. 15 release, said it “obtained an emergency court order to freeze assets in a Zurich, Switzerland-based trading account that was used to reap more than $1.7 million from trading in advance of [the] public announcement about the acquisition of H.J. Heinz Company.”
Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation has hopped aboard, the BBC reports.
“The FBI is aware of trading anomalies the day before Heinz’s announcement,” an FBI spokesman said, in a BBC report. “The FBI is consulting with the SEC to determine if a crime was committed.”
BBC also reports that investigators have not implicated Heinz or its new owners in a crime. The investigation so far is focused on the suspicious trade activity — not on the companies involved in the deal, BBC reports.
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Cheryl Chumley is a continuous news writer for The Washington Times. Previously, she was part of the start-up team for The Washington Times’ digital aggregation product, Times247. She’s also a 2008-2009 Robert Novak journalism fellow with The Phillips Foundation. She can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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