 Steinberg's lawyer, Barry Berke, said the defense will call at
most a few witnesses and present its case in less than a day.
"We'll be in a position to sum up on Monday," he said.
Steinberg will not testify, Berke said.
Steinberg, 41, is charged with five counts of securities fraud
and conspiracy to commit securities fraud for trading in Dell
Inc and Nvidia Corp based on alleged insider information. He
denies wrongdoing.
With his indictment in March, Steinberg became the highest-level
employee at Steven A. Cohen's hedge fund to face criminal
insider trading charges. SAC agreed last month to plead guilty
to fraud charges and pay $1.2 billion.
In Friday's proceedings, the government called Hyung Lim, the
last of four cooperating witnesses, who prosecutors said was the
origin of information about Nvidia on which they say Steinberg
traded.
Lim, a former marketing executive at Altera Corp and Broadcom
Corp, testified to giving confidential sales figures from his
employers to an occasional poker friend, Danny Kuo, an analyst
who worked at Bear Stearns and later, beginning in 2008, at
Whittier Trust Co.
"It was easy information for me to get, and he was a friend,"
Lim said.
Later, Lim said, Kuo asked him if he "had a guy who could get
him inside information" on Nvidia. Lim said that from 2008 to
2011 he passed along financial information from Chris Choi, a
friend he met in church who worked in accounting at Nvidia.
Kuo pleaded guilty in 2012 to conspiracy and securities fraud
charges. Choi, who could not be reached for comment on Friday,
was not charged with wrongdoing.
As Lim passed along the tips, he said Kuo began paying him, once
covering a $5,000 gambling debt in Las Vegas and twice providing
envelopes with $5,000 in cash.
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Prosecutors say that Kuo in turn passed the Nvidia information on to
other Wall Street analysts, including Jon Horvath, then at SAC's
Sigma Capital Management division under Steinberg.
Horvath, who has pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy
to commit securities fraud and securities fraud, testified earlier
in the trial that he provided the Nvidia information from Kuo to
Steinberg.
Also on Friday, Salvatore Cincinelli, an FBI special agent,
testified that SAC made a profit of $409,530 on a set of Nvidia
trades in 2009 that prosecutors say were based on inside
information.
"The government has no further witnesses," Assistant U.S. Attorney
Antonia Apps said, after calling four witnesses on Friday.
The case is U.S. v. Steinberg, U.S. District Court, Southern
District of New York, No. 12-cr-00121.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond; editing by
Dan Grebler)
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