Representative Chris Collins is interviewed during the 2017 "Congress of Tomorrow" Joint Republican Issues Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. January 25, 2017. Mark Makela | Reuters

From the beginning, Chris Collins' career in politics was defined by his credentials as a rich businessman. Now the New York Republican's business interests have dashed his political ambitions. His ties to an Australian biotechnology company have sparked investigations from government watchdogs, lodged insider trading charges against him and his 25-year-old son, gotten him arrested and, most recently, torpedoed his Congressional re-election campaign. Collins boasts more than three decades as a "successful small businessman," according to his official website, beginning as an employee of Westinghouse Electric in 1972 and founding his first company in 1983. In his first, failed bid for Congress in 1998, Collins made headlines for outspending his opponent, longstanding incumbent Democrat John LaFalce, by hundreds of thousands of dollars. He campaigned on his business credentials in a winning local government race in 2007. When he was eventually elected to to the House of Representatives in 2012, Collins immediately became one of the 10 richest lawmakers, with an average net worth of nearly $60 million, according to Ballotpedia, citing data from political contributions database OpenSecrets. On Wednesday, the Republican congressman from a Trump-friendly Buffalo-area New York district found his business career in the spotlight once again, when he was indicted and arrested on insider trading charges by federal authorities in Manhattan.

A top stakeholder and board member in drug company Innate Immunotherapeutics, Collins was accused of funneling nonpublic information about a failed drug trial to his son before the company announced it publicly. Collins' son, Cameron, who was also charged in the indictment, allegedly acted on that heads-up, selling nearly 1.4 million shares just days before the company's stock dropped more than 92 percent on the news. The congressman's actions, prosecutors charge, helped numerous defendants and other co-conspirators avoid losing about $768,000 on the shares. Collins and his son, along with the father of his son's fiancee, pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against them by federal officers in Manhattan. Up until his reversal on Saturday, when he ended his reelection campaign, Collins had vowed to continue the fight to keep his seat in Congress. Chris Collins tweet

The intersection of business and politics

The indictment shed new light on the intertwined relationship between Collins' life as a businessman and his duties as a publicly elected representative. Coming to Congress with decades of private sector experience under his belt, it was no surprise that Collins landed a spot on the Small Business Committee, which was chaired by Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., at the time. However, the freshman lawmaker was also appointed chairman of the Subcommittee on Health Care and Technology — even though he was serving on the board of Innate, whose business can be affected by health care legislation passed by Congress. A senior congressional aide, who declined to be named, told CNBC that Collins was approached to lead the subcommittee before his ties to Innate were known. Collins' appointment, even as an incoming congressman, was not unusual for that committee, the aide said. In such a large committee with such little legislative jurisdiction, the aide said the people matching members with subcommittees were "grasping at straws sometimes to fill some of these roles." A Buffalo News report at the time quoted Collins saying, "I didn't ask [Graves] why" he was picked. David Chase, a former prosecutor with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Miami until 1999, said that members of Congress on company boards have to be careful about conflicts of interest. "He has to make sure he was not doing something on the business side that would affect his duties as an elected official," Chase said. Asked whether leading a health care subcommittee while serving as a drug company's board member made those two things more difficult to separate, Chase said, "It gets a hell of a lot closer, doesn't it?" The number of U.S. lawmakers who own stock more than doubled from 2001 to 2013, to the point where more than half of Congress holds shares in companies, according to the Harvard Business Review. Separate figures suggest that the more representatives invest in a particular stock, the less that company's lobbyists spend in Washington.

'A private matter'