“American regulators have declared war on insider trading’
A WHISPERED aside in a bar, an in¬discreet remark in an e-mail- this is the stuff on which inside trading thrives. But Blue Bottle, a Hong Kong firm fingered on February 26 by US markets watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), showed more chutzpah. It netted $2.7 million trading on information it had gathered by hacking directly into computers to view press releases before they were published.
This is not the most egregious insider trading case of recent days. That accolade goes to a ring of 13 bankers and-fundmanagers, including ex-employees of UBS, Bear Steams and Morgan Stanley, Recently, they were busted by the SEC for trading illicitly ahead of mergers and analysts' stock tips. What started as a ruse to repay a $25,000 debt, allegedly spiralled into a lucrative seam as colourful as it was criminal? Mobile phones were binned to cover their tracks and cash passed around in Doritos packets. Some say the bust was the biggest blow against insider trading since Ivan Boesky was jailed and fined $100 million.
That was 20 years ago. More recently, the SEC has lost its place in the vanguard of financial crime-fighting. In the rubble of the dot com collapse, it was made to look flat –footed by Eliot Spitzer; then New York's attorney-general and now its governor. Now, Christopher Cox, SEC's chairman since '05, has made fighting insider traders a priority. SEC must prevent any "buzz in the markets that you can get away with it," says one of his officers, Walter Ricciardi, "Nothing paints a picture as well as people being led away in handcuffs."
This is not the most egregious insider trading case of recent days. That accolade goes to a ring of 13 bankers and-fundmanagers, including ex-employees of UBS, Bear Steams and Morgan Stanley, Recently, they were busted by the SEC for trading illicitly ahead of mergers and analysts' stock tips. What started as a ruse to repay a $25,000 debt, allegedly spiralled into a lucrative seam as colourful as it was criminal? Mobile phones were binned to cover their tracks and cash passed around in Doritos packets. Some say the bust was the biggest blow against insider trading since Ivan Boesky was jailed and fined $100 million.
That was 20 years ago. More recently, the SEC has lost its place in the vanguard of financial crime-fighting. In the rubble of the dot com collapse, it was made to look flat –footed by Eliot Spitzer; then New York's attorney-general and now its governor. Now, Christopher Cox, SEC's chairman since '05, has made fighting insider traders a priority. SEC must prevent any "buzz in the markets that you can get away with it," says one of his officers, Walter Ricciardi, "Nothing paints a picture as well as people being led away in handcuffs."
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