Steve Cohen’s SAC group of companies were yesterday sentenced by US District Judge Laura Swain, who approved the guilty plea entered by the defendants on November 8, 2013. The sentencing brings to an end a seven-year-long investigation by US prosecutors.

Steven Cohen’s SAC group of companies were yesterday sentenced by US District Judge Laura Swain, who approved the guilty plea entered by the defendants on November 8, 2013. The sentencing brings to an end a seven-year-long investigation by US prosecutors.

“After due consideration, the court has accepted the guilty plea and imposed sentence on SAC, including the payment of $1.184 billion in financial penalties,” said Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara.

“So far, this office has successfully convicted eight SAC employees of insider trading, and when so much criminal conduct takes place within one institution, it is appropriate to impose criminal liability on the institution itself,” Bharara added.

SAC Capital Advisors LP, SAC Capital Advisors, CR Intrinsic Investors and Sigma Capital Management LLC are the entities responsible for the management of a group of affiliated hedge funds known as the SAC hedge fund, or SAC. SAC Capital reportedly changed its name to Point72 Asset Management LP this week.

From 1999 through at least 2010, it was found that numerous employees of SAC obtained and traded on information they were not permitted to have or recommended trades based on such information to SAC portfolio managers.

See more on the case here.

The SAC hedge fund is required to pay an additional $1.184 billion financial penalty on top of the $616 million the SAC companies have already agreed to pay to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The case was brought in coordination with President Barack Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, on which Bharara serves as a co-chair of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group.

The task force was established to “wage an aggressive, coordinated, and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes.” More than 20 federal agencies, 94 US attorneys’ offices - and state and local partners - are involved.

Over the past three fiscal years, the Justice Department said it has filed nearly 10,000 financial fraud cases against some 15,000 defendants.