Mark Cuban Acquitted of Insider Trading

It’s finally over for Mark Cuban.

The billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks was cleared of insider trading Wednesday after a multi-year battle with the SEC.

Cuban was acquitted in a federal district court in Dallas. The jury, nine members who deliberated for only a couple of hours, said that the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to provide that Cuban agreed to keep certain information confidential and not trade on it before it became public.

After hugging his lawyers and calling his family, Cuban held an unexpected news conference. 'Hopefully people will start paying attention to how the SEC does business,'' Cuban said. ''I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I'm glad this happened to me. I'm glad I'm able to be the person who can afford to stand up to them.''

Lead SEC attorney Jan Folena wasn’t in any mood to comment. Folena and the rest of the SEC legal team hurried out of the courtroom only saying, ''We believe we did the best we could in this case, and things turn out the way they turn out.''

Related: Everything You Should Know About the Mark Cuban Trial

The trial began in 2004 when Cuban sold his $7.9 million stake in Mamma.com. He had learned that the company would announce a secondary offering that would dilute the value of his position. By selling prior to the announcement, he avoided a six-figure loss but Cuban said that he never agreed to keep the information he received from then-CEO Guy Faure quiet and never said that he wouldn’t trade on the news.

He also claimed that his decision to sell the stock was more driven by Mamma.com’s association with stock swindler Irving Kott, who died in 2009.

Throughout the trial, legal experts said that the evidence against Cuban was weak—the reason the SEC brought a civil case instead of a criminal trial. John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University told the Associated Press, ”This proves to the SEC that it needs to avoid he-said, she-said cases[.]"

Cuban, who is reportedly worth about $2.5 billion said that the legal fees associated with the case far exceeded the $750,000 fine the SEC had sought but according to him, he wanted to stand up to SEC after claiming that it had lied about the facts in the trial.