Ex-AMD Chief Linked to Galleon Case

Hector Ruiz, the former CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., reportedly shared confidential information about the company with a defendant in the Galleon hedge fund inside trading case.

Ruiz isn't a defendant in the case, but The Wall Street Journal reported that he is the unnamed AMD executive who passed information along to one of the people charged, Danielle Chiesi.

The Journal cited an unnamed source in its report.

The government says that Galleon Group, whose co-founder Raj Rajaratnam is a defendant, and the hedge fund where Chiesi worked, New Castle LLC, bought AMD shares based on the inside tip from the AMD exec about a reorganization last fall.

But because of the timing of that purchase before last fall's global economic meltdown, the New York Times has estimated that those investments lost about $30 million

The government alleges that Chiesi and another New Castle co-defendant, Mark Kurland, also got inside information about Sunnyvale-based AMD from Robert Moffat, a senior vice president at International Business Machines Corp., and from Anil Kumar of Saratoga, who worked at McKinsey & Co.

Rajiv Goel of Los Altos, who was a director of strategic investments at Intel Capital, has also been charged in the case.

Ruiz left AMD earlier this year to head a spinoff from AMD that was supported by a $2.1 billion investment by investors from Abu Dhabi, one of the deals that the government charges that the insiders tried to profit from.