Leon Cooperman, the billionaire founder of hedge-fund giant Omega Advisors, was charged Wednesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission of insider trading, for allegedly using his status as a major shareholder of an energy company to access and then profit off of nonpublic information.

According to the S.E.C.’s announcement, Cooperman and his company, Omega Advisors, learned in 2010 that Atlas Pipeline Partners (APL)—which Cooperman had reportedly once called a “shitty” business—was planning to sell its Elk City facility for about $650 million. After hearing about the deal from an APL executive, Omega Advisors increased its stake in the energy company. After the deal closed, APL stock price rose over 30 percent.

“By doing so, he allegedly undermined the public confidence in the securities markets and took advantage of other investors who did not have this information,” Andrew J. Ceresney, director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, said in a statement to CNBC Wednesday.

The complaint further alleges that Cooperman had attempted to concoct a cover story when the S.E.C. began investigating him, saying that he had contacted the same executive in order to coordinate stories. “The executive was shocked and angered when he learned that Cooperman traded in advance of the public announcement,” the press release continued.

Cooperman and his representatives told CNBC that they planned to fight the charges, claiming that the S.E.C. had sought a settlement with him and his fund, which Cooperman found “unacceptable.”

Prior to his indictment, Cooperman, who is worth an estimated $3.1 billion, last made news for penning an open letter to Barack Obama in 2011, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, attacking the president for encouraging what he saw as class warfare. “Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be,” wrote Cooperman, who was born in the Bronx to working-class, Polish immigrants. “Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who must be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle.”