Federal securities regulators charged eight people in Georgia with insider trading on Tuesday, saying they bought stock in a company ahead of a merger announcement after one of them learned about a pending deal. The Securities and Exchange Commission said that Thomas D. Melvin Jr., an accountant from Griffin, Ga., learned from a client that the drug giant Sanofi-Aventis was planning to buy Chattem, a pharmaceutical-products company that was then publicly traded. The client, who was a director of Chattem, was seeking Mr. Melvin’s advice on the deal’s tax implications on his stock options and made it clear that the discussion was confidential, the S.E.C. said.
