SEC charges stock scam by Abu Dhabi man

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed insider trading charges on Monday against a manager at Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (AORC) who made more than $450,000 profit from suspicious trades before a takeover of Nova Chemicals Corp.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan accuses Khaled Mohammed Sharif Al Sayed Al Hashemi of buying 120,000 Nova shares in two weeks leading up to an announcement of Abu Dhabi-government run International Petroleum Investment Co (IPIC) acquiring Nova Chemicals, which was then trading on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges.

It said Al Hashemi, a government employee, bought the shares through an online brokerage account in the United States at an average price of $1.41 per share and then sold those shares on February 23, the day of the announcement for an average of $5.24 per share, realizing $458,760 in profits.

Al Hashemi's representatives in the case were not yet known.

The regulator's action follows charges last week in a much bigger case involving financier Hazem Khalid Al Braikan of Kuwait and other Gulf firms of having improperly earned millions of dollars from trades in two U.S. firms, Harman International Industries Inc and Textron Inc. Al Braikan was found dead on Sunday in an apparent suicide.

(Reporting by Grant McCool; editing by Andre Grenon)