Image: Sonic the Hedgehog's Twitter
Sonic’s original creator Yuji Naka has now been arrested for insider trading over Final Fantasy.
Sonic the Hedgehog’s original creator Yuji Naka has just been arrested for the second time in the last month over alleged insider trading. The Balan Wonderworld game director had originally been arrested on November 17 for similar charges involving Square Enix’s Dragon Quest Tact. This time, Asahi reports that he’s been arrested for insider trading on a separate Square Enix game: Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier.
Naka was arrested alongside Square Enix employee Taisuke Sazaki for allegedly having confidential knowledge of Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier’s existence before the game was announced. Using that knowledge, Naka reportedly bought roughly 120,000 shares in the game’s developer ATeam before its public reveal. These shares were worth around 144.7 million yen (that’s $1 million), thus making for a pretty damning case of insider trading.
This amount far exceeds that which was reported in Naka’s original arrest for insider trading over Dragon Quest Tact. In a similar turn of events, Naka allegedly purchased 10,000 shares in the developer’s studio Aiming for 2.8 million yen (around $20,000) before the game was revealed. Square Enix employee Taisuke Sazaki was involved in this charge too. Over the new Final Fantasy charges, Naka, Sazaki and an unnamed third party allegedly participated in insider trading together.
Naka would have obviously profited from buying shares from these studios for cheap before selling them after Dragon Quest Tact and Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier were announced, when share prices would’ve gone up - but it is unknown if he actually did make such a sale. What complicates things is that both games were Square Enix games, and Naka announced that he was suing the company earlier this year over development trouble with his game Balan Wonderworld, which was published by the company.
Just as an aside, I played Balan Wonderworld when it came out, and it’s not an experience I would inflict upon my worst enemy. If you see it pop up during end-of-year sales, avoid it like the plague.
