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[ad_1] Peter Coker Jr., left, is issued search warrants from police at his villa on the southern resort island of Phuket, Thailand, Jan. 11, 2023. Crime Suppression Division, Royal Thai Police | AP NEWARK, N.J. – A former fugitive in the securities fraud case involving a New Jersey deli company once valued at $100 million renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2019, prosecutors revealed Thursday as they asked a judge to deny him bail. Peter Coker Jr. "poses a serious risk of flight, and ... there are no conditions or combination thereof that can assure his appearance at future proceedings," said the letter by the U.S. Attorney's Office to federal Magistrate Judge Edward Kiel. In the same letter, prosecutors said Coker Jr. had "stood to make tens of millions of dollars" from a hoped-for reverse merger of the deli company, which the goal of the "complex, long-term fraud' spanning at least seven years that grossly inflated its stock price. "And t

[ad_1] Federal authorities charged a former Pfizer employee and his close friend Thursday with illegally trading shares based on non-public trial results on the pharmaceutical company's Covid antiviral pill Paxlovid . The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission both announced respective insider trading charges against Amit Dagar , a former senior statistical programming lead at Pfizer, and his friend Atul Bhiwapurkar. Dagar, who helped manage and analyze Paxlovid clinical trial data, and Bhiwapurkar "participated in an insider trading scheme to reap illicit profits from options trading based on inside information" about the then-unreleased Paxlovid results in November 2021, according to the DOJ. The two individuals sold their Pfizer call options at "significant profits" totaling more than $350,000, the DOJ said in a release . "The charges in this case relate to the personal conduct of a former Pfizer employee in violation of