Acquitted of insider trading, the former hedge fund manager Rengan Rajaratnam may now avoid a separate court battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lawyers for Mr. Rajaratnam and the S.E.C. filed a letter on Thursday requesting that the pending civil case against him be stayed for 60 days while both sides try to reach an agreement. The suit is related to the charge that Mr. Rajaratnam committed insider trading while working at the Galleon Group.
The letter was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan less than two weeks after a jury of eight women and four men acquitted Mr. Rajaratnam, 43, of that charge.
The S.E.C.’s case faces a lower burden of proof than the criminal case. It is likely that both sides could reach a nominal monetary settlement, although Daniel Gitner, the lawyer for Mr. Rajaratnam, may seek a dismissal of the case entirely. Mr. Gitner declined to comment.
A spokesman for the S.E.C., John J. Nester, declined to comment.
The acquittal was the first loss for Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, in an insider trading case. Mr. Bharara’s office has secured 85 convictions thus far, including one for Mr. Rajaratnam’s brother, Raj Rajaratnam.
Rengan Rajaratnam was accused of conspiring with his older brother to illegally trade in the stock of Clearwire, a wireless broadband company, and Advanced Micro Devices, the chip maker.
Mr. Rajaratnam was acquitted a week after the judge, Naomi R. Buchwald, dismissed two of the more serious charges against him, leaving the jury to decide only whether he had conspired with his older brother to use inside information to trade on A.M.D.
The jury reached its decision after just four hours of deliberation, and several jurors commented afterward that the prosecution lacked any convincing evidence. Mr. Rajaratnam was arrested in 2009, and indicted just shy of the S.E.C.’s five-year deadline to file the case.