A former chief financial officer of a hedge fund firm has been charged in an $8 million insider trading case as the Securities and Exchange Commission steps up its enforcement efforts against private investment firms.

Peter Yee, who was the chief financial officer of hedge fund firm ValueAct Capital, was one of seven charged, in a civil case filed in federal court in San Francisco, with profiting from trading on non-public information in Acxiom Corp., a marketing services firm.

The charges came only two weeks after Galleon Group head Raj Rajaratnam and six others were arrested and charged with a $20 million insider trading scheme.

In 2007, Yee, the SEC claimed, told his brother-in-law, Chen Tang, who worked for private equity firm Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, that ValueAct was planning to acquire Acxiom. Later, when the deal fell apart, Yee also passed that information along to Tang, who passed it on to others.

Although Yee did not make any trades himself, Tang and the others profited by more than $6 million, the SEC alleged.

Yee left ValueAct in 2008 because of the SEC investigation. The firm is cooperating with the regulatory agency.

Michael Cello, Yee’s attorney, told Reuters that his client denied the charges and intended to vigorously contest the SEC’s action.

Besides the Acxiom trades, the SEC alleged that Tang tipped off three of his friends to non-public information about mattress manufacturer Tempur-pedic International Inc. Tang and his friends made more than $2 million on that information, the SEC claimed.