Mavericks’ Cuban blogs his innocence

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, is defending himself on his website against insider trading charges that the SEC levied against him this week. In a posting yesterday on blogmaverick.com, he said he never agreed to keep private information he received about the pending financing of an Internet search engine company. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Mr. Cuban on Monday, alleging that in June 2004 he sold his 600,000 shares in Mamma.com using non-public, confidential information concerning an impending stock offering. The sale allowed him to avoid $750,000 in losses. Mamma.com is a subsidiary of Copernic Inc. of Montreal. Mr. Cuban posted a transcript of a conversation between former Mamma.com chief executive Guy Faure and lawyers for Mr. Cuban, in which Mr. Faure acknowledged that Mr. Cuban didn't explicitly agree to keep their conversation confidential. “The SEC claims there was an agreement between these parties to the conversation to keep certain information confidential,” Mr. Cuban wrote. The posting came one day after he responded to the SEC charges, stating that the “government's claims are false, and they will be proven to be so.”