NY27

Assumed congressional office in 2013. Former Career: Erie County Executive. Education: North Carolina State University, University of Alabama at Birmingham. Currently resides in Clarence. Christopher Collins is the Republican Representative from New York's 27th congressional district since 2013. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University

and then earned an MBA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As an entrepreneur he was the founder, President and CEO of Nuttall Gear Corporation which Collins sold to a large industrial conglomerate in 1997. He was the Executive for Erie County, 2007-2011. After losing a race for Congress in 1998, Collins purchased or invested in over twenty bankrupt and financially troubled companies which were combined into several platform companies which act as starting point for follow-on acquisitions in similar areas. In August 2016 Collins purchased 4 million more shares in Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biopharmaceutical company, making him the largest shareholder at that time. Collins pushed the company's stock to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price who purchased 400,613 shares of Innate Immunotherapeutics. In October 2017 The Office of Congressional Ethics found there was "substantial reason to believe" that Collins used inside information in transactions involving Innate stock, as well as using his office to benefit the company. On August 8, 2018 Collins, along with his son Cameron Collins and the father of his son’s fiancée, Stephen Zarsky, was arrested by FBI agents for insider trading. According to the federal government’s indictment, Collins shared non-public information about Innate — specifically, about negative results resulting from Innate’s clinical trials — with his son, who then passed that information along to Zarsky. The federal government alleges that by doing so, Collins, his son, and Zarsky were able to avoid nearly $800,000 in potential losses.