Federal regulators will see their insider trading suit against a Chinese investor who allegedly helped reap more than $29 million in profits from the Comcast-DreamWorks Animation deal go forward, after U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken denied the defendant's motion to dismiss Monday.

Shaohua Yin, who goes by Michael, is a former partner at Summitview Capital Management in Hong Kong. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought insider trading charges against Yin and others in February 2017. The complaint alleged that brokerage accounts opened in the names of others but controlled by Yin amassed a large position in DreamWorks ahead of the April 2016 announcement of the deal.

Yin allegedly gained information about the deal from an asset manager at another firm, PAG Asia Capital, that lost its bid to acquire DreamWorks. The SEC believes that another defendant, a friend of Yin's who worked for a firm in unrelated talks about a partnership with PAG, may have been privy to the nonpublic information.

In April 2017, Yin filed a motion to dismiss the case. He argued that the SEC did not adequately allege the beginning of the tipping chain by not alleging that the original unidentified tipper acted for personal benefit, as now required to prove insider trading. Yin finds the SEC's argument, as Oetken summarized, “too attenuated to be plausible.”

Oetken, however, disagreed. He pointed to the SEC identifying a potential tipper in Yin's friend who behaved with some suspicion just before the deal event by opening a trading account using his money but in a relative's name just as Yin did. Likewise, the complaint laying out the timing of stock purchases connected to developments in the nonpublic deal discussions adequately alleged that “the timing of the trades was suspicious and not merely a lucky hunch,” Oetken said.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati partner Michael Sommer represents Yin. He did not respond to a request for comment.

An SEC spokesman also did not respond to a request for comment.