NEW YORK - A former partner at Ernst & Young LLP (ERNY.UL) - a US firm specializing in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services - and an investment banker were charged with insider trading, including the 2006 buyout of Freescale Semiconductor led by Blackstone Group (BX.N), federal prosecutors said Thursday. James Gansman, 48, who worked at E&Y in New York, was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy in an indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Donna Murdoch, 44, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, who worked as an investment banker at an unnamed firm, was also charged with securities fraud and conspiracy. PAKISTANI The devlopment comes as a former Credit Suisse investment banker of Pakistani origin awaits sentencing on Friday on charges of involvement in a multimillion-dollar insider trading plot. Hafiz Muhammad Zubair Naseem, 37, was convicted on one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and 28 counts of insider trading. In court papers submitted late Friday, lawyers for the Pakistani banker complained that a probation officer had recommended a prison sentence of 8 to 10 years for the man held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan since his February conviction. The lawyers asked Judge Robert Patterson to "impose a fairer sentence than the extremely severe one suggested by the Probation Office." They called for minimal jail time rather than the "extremely severe" eight years or more, citing humanitarian reasons. In the E & Y case, according to the indictment, Gansman passed on inside tips to Murdoch about pending transactions involving E&Y clients, and Murdoch used the tips to generate more than $390,000 in trading profits. "We have cooperated fully with the government throughout its investigation," E&Y said in a statement. Gansman resigned from the firm in October 2007. The defendants' attorneys could not immediately be reached for comment. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also filed civil charges of insider trading against Gansman and Murdoch, along with charges against Murdoch's father, who it said also traded on the tips and got illegal profits of about $63,000. Two other people, who were not identified by the SEC, allegedly traded for profits of more than $140,000, bringing the total illicit profits in the case to nearly $600,000, the commission said. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI, which investigated the criminal case, the scheme lasted from about May 2006 to December 2007 and involved illegal trading around seven publicly traded companies -- Freescale, ATI Technologies, Portal Player, Spectralink, K2, Dade Behring and Activision. Gansman was the E&Y partner in charge of the human resource consulting services that the auditing firm provided for the transactions related to its clients, the indictment said. Among E&Y's clients was Blackstone, which led the $17.6 billion leveraged buyout of Freescale in December 2006.