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NY Daily News
Chaunce SEC meeting
Faces lawyers for 2 hrs.
February 24, 2005
Chaunce Hayden, the gossip journalist caught up in the Howard Stern Sirius insider-trading probe, was grilled for two hours yesterday by five SEC attorneys - but Hayden's lawyer said he is not the target of the investigation.
"My sense is he's not the subject of the probe," Hayden's attorney, Robert Horowitz, told the Daily News yesterday.
But Hayden told The News he'd be "shocked" if the probe "began and ended with me."
After meeting with the SEC lawyers, Horowitz described the government's probe as an "inquiry into trading activity in advance of an announcement."
"They're trying to find out if there's any impropriety," Horowitz noted.
Horowitz said he was not aware of others being fingered by the government in connection with trading in Sirius stock ahead of the Oct. 6 announcement that shock jock Stern was heading to the satellite radio giant.
Sirius spokesman Patrick Reilly said, "Neither Sirius, nor any of its officers, directors or employees have received a subpoena in this matter."
After the two-hour questioning, a shaken Hayden emerged from the SEC offices in the Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan and said he hopes his nightmare "is over with today. I can't tell you how much I want it to end."
He told The News he has never owned Sirius stock.
Hayden is a regular guest on Stern's show and was in Stern's studio the day the radio megastar announced he was heading to Sirius.
A couple weeks before, the gossip writer predicted on a TV show that Stern would make the leap from his current employer, Infinity, to Sirius, but has said he based that on his own reporting, not inside information.
In the five days before Stern made the big announcement, Sirius stock rose 26%. It jumped another 30% early on Oct. 6, and finished the day up 16% at five times the stock's normal volume.
Meanwhile, Viacom - the media giant that is losing the shock jock to Sirius in 2006 - posted a massive $18 billion loss yesterday, to reflect the faltering of its Infinity radio and outdoor division.
The writedown was a charge that is required by accounting rules when assets decline in value.
Like the rest of the radio business, a once powerful Infinity is struggling with slowing ad sales and fewer listeners. The industry is facing increased competition from satellite radio kingpins Sirius and XM, as well as from Apple's red-hot iPods.
Viacom plans to sell radio stations in smaller markets but said yesterday that it's plowing dollars into its stations in large cities.
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