i ve been involved with innate therapeutics for almost 15 years. i m the largest shareholder and i talk about it all the time, just like you d talk about your children. were your telling other constituents and friends of yours to go ahead. this is a great stock. go ahead to buy it. i talked to them about the great work this company is doing. the market for secondary progressive m.s. and there are many hundreds, 50, 100 people from western new york, friends, family and so forth who decided on their own, this was a pretty darn good investment and it certainly turned out to be so. you understand why to the average person out there, there is something sort of smelly in all of this. you understand why people are complaining and why it seems a little sloppy, if you will, why the democrats, a lot of democrats are going after congressman price and threatening his confirmation over this one issue. it s just so absurd. let s discuss this and more.
night that he found out some bad information about the company. and then proceeded to tip off his son who also invested in the company. so take a look at this timeline. this was on june 22nd of 2017, summer of last year. at 6:55 p.m., the indictment says he received an e-mail from the ceo of the company saying that a drug trial had been a failure. now 16 minutes later, at 7:11 p.m., he starts calling his son. he tries to make that call four times before he is successful. and at 7:16, he speaks to his son and informs him about this information that he had learned. and it is the next day, 7:42 a.m., in the morning, that his son starts putting in orders to sell off his shares of his stock in this company. n ultimately, the indictment says that he was able to avoid some $570,000 in losses. now a lot of congressional reporters are actually already familiar with this company innate immunotherapeutics
swift action they took to unload the stocks and save hundreds of thousands of dollars according to the prosecutors doing all this above the law. thinking they were above the law. republican congressman chris collins, the first member of congress to support donald trump, appearing in court late this afternoon after federal prosecutors charged him, his son cameron and another man with 13 counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and making a false statement to the fbi. the charges stemming from an alleged insider trading scheme. first lady reporter: playing out on the south lawn of the white house. at the center of it all, an australian pharmaceutical company where collins was a board member. congressman collins was told some confidential and highly sensitive information about the drug, the information not yet made public.
back now to one of our top stories this hour. republican congressman chris collins of new york arrested on charges of insider trading. prosecutors say collins tipped off his son about negative information regarding a biotech firm. collins was on the board of. his son was able to then sell off shares avoiding more than half a million in losses. collins was already, by the way, under scrutiny for his role on the board, as well as recruiting several lawmakers to invest in the firm, including the former health and human services secretary tom price when he was a member of congress. price s investment, by the way, came up during his confirmation hearing last year. i asked congressman collins about it at the time. here s what he told me. this is in january of 2017. did you encourage him to buy stock in this company called innate immunotherapeutics? no, absolutely not. there was nothing done that was insider trading or unethical.