(Bloomberg) -- A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker was sentenced to a year of home confinement and 1,500 hours of community service for providing stolen client information to a Swiss man at the center of a global insider-trading ring that generated tens of millions of dollars in illegal profit.

Bryan Cohen, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in January, admitted passing tips about Buffalo Wild Wings Inc. and Syngenta AG to Marc Demane-Debih, a Swiss trader who is cooperating with prosecutors after his arrest last year. Cohen, 34, was sentenced Tuesday via video conference by U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan.

Federal prosecutors had urged Pauley to sentence Cohen to 37 months in prison, saying he leaked secrets to Demane-Debih for three years in a “cunning and calculated” crime.

“Mr. Cohen was a full and complete participant,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Cooper told the judge during the hearing. “He was a sophisticated and educated investment banker. It was a crime of greed and opportunity. The defendant was already wealthy. The only reason to commit this crime was to get more money.”

Cohen and Demane-Debih acted more like drug dealers than white-collar criminals, using code words and burner phones and using intermediaries to pass large sums of cash, the prosecutor said.

Cohen’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, urged the judge on Tuesday to give the defendant credit for time served and order community service with underprivileged kids in his native France. Pauley said that plan wasn’t workable, and ordered home confinement in the U.S., plus a $25,000 fine.

Abandoned Scheme

Brafman said his client is a “kind and compassionate” man who abandoned the scheme with Demane-Debih “long before he thought he was going to be arrested.” He said Cohen developed asthma as an adult, which exposes him to a greater risk from Covid-19 than other inmates.

Cohen’s guilty plea means he can’t work in the finance industry again and that he’ll be deported from the U.S. after serving his sentence, his lawyer said. Dozens of friends and family members, many of whom listened in on the hearing, sent letters to the judge seeking leniency for Cohen.

Cohen worked for Goldman Sachs from 2010 to 2019, first as an associate in London, later as a vice president in New York. He and Demane-Debih met in London through another Goldman Sachs investment banker. Prosecutors said he provided insider tips from April 2015 and November 2017.

After Cohen moved to New York, Demane-Debih arranged for him to retrieve burner phones that could be used to transmit tips, according to prosecutors. The phones were supplied by the Swiss trader’s friend, Georgios Nikas, the owner of a Greek restaurant franchise and another member of the insider-trading ring, court records show.

Nikas, who faces U.S. charges, is believed to be in Greece.

Read More: Insider-Trading Probe Lands Conviction of U.S. Leaker

Demane-Debih, who was arrested in Serbia and extradited to the U.S., said he passed at least $1 million to Cohen or his brother in the south of France, where he stashed the money in a safe in his parents’ house, according to the government. Demain-Debih pleaded guilty to 38 criminal counts, admitting he made $70 million from trading on secret information he got from a network of bankers in the U.S., Europe and Israel.

Shortly after Cohen moved to New York in 2017, Buffalo Wild Wings asked Goldman for advise on a takeover approach by Arby’s Restaurant Group Inc., prosecutors said. Cohen was made aware of the potential acquisition the same day, Oct. 17, 2017. Nikas purchased 22,000 Buffalo Wild Wings shares between Oct. 20 and Oct. 27 for $2.5 million, selling 9,000 of them by Nov. 1 for an initial profit of $79,074, the U.S. said.

The case is U.S. v. Cohen, 19-cr-00741, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

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