As the Toronto Star is reporting, a Canadian couple is being accused of illegal insider trading stemming from a deal that he learned about through recovering emails on behalf of executives at the company where he worked.

According to the Ontario Securities Commission, Shane Bashir Shuman, who worked in the IT department of MDS Sciex, improperly used knowledge of a pending takeover offer for Molecular Devices Corporation (based in California).

Susman learned about the takeover when he was asked by Sciex’s communications officer to help retrieve some documents after her computer crashed on January 23. This executive asked Shuman to search for any documents which included the code name of the transaction (“Monument”), but told him that the information in the emails was so sensitive that he should not view the document once it was recovered.

Six days later, the deal was announced and the stock of MDCC soared by 50%. This netted Shuman nearly $1 million on the 12,000 shares and 900 option contracts he had just purchased through an E-Trade account.

Commentary: Curiosity killed the cat… or at least is likely to put him in jail. Perhaps a simple training program in illegal insider trading could have prevented all of this.