Doug Whitman, founder of Whitman Capital LLC — a hedge fund — has been sentenced to two years in prison, according to Bloomberg, for trading on illicit tips about Polycom, Google, and Marvell Technology Group. He said he received the information from Roomy Khan, former Intel executive. The transactions conducted produced $935,000 for Whitman on the trades based on her tips, and those of a Whitman-hired consultant named Karl Motey,.

The Whitman Capital LLC hedge fun appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York to seek a ruling that that judge had improperly instructed the jury on how to consider the issue of willful blindness at his insider trading trial, but the court rejected the argument.

Benjamin Fischer, a partner at Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello PC, told Bloomberg that the ruling supports, “the government's most powerful prosecution tool…The endorsement of the conscious avoidance theory will certainly embolden the government to rely upon it in securities fraud cases going forward.”