Global articles on espionage, spying, bugs, and other interesting topics.

Briton amassed $1.2 million profit with S’porean wife from insider trading

Greed was the clear motivation for the most serious case of insider trading to appear before a British court.

After all, Christian Littlewood, an investment banker who made his way up the ranks to director at Dresdner Kleinwort, had already been earning £400,000 (S$820,000) a year. And yet he still used information gleaned from the office to make £590,000 in profit from illegal insider trading.

He made his Singaporean wife Angie, 39, to use her maiden name, Lew Siew Yoon, to buy the shares in her name to avoid detection. She teamed up with her Singaporean friend, Helmy Omar Sa’aid, in using her husband’s price-sensitive tip-offs to trade 2.15 million pounds worth of shares.

All three pleaded guilty to eight counts of insider trading for the scam that they had been doing for eight years – from 2000 to 2008 – at different London Stock Exchange and AIM listed shares.

According to a Straits Times report, the court found that Littlewood would spy on his colleague’s computers and eavesdropped to gather information which he would pass to his wife and Sa’id. They would then buy shares in firms that were subject to takeover bids. Once the share prices went up after news of the takeover came up, the two would then sell their shares, making a tidy profit.

Christian Littlewood, the most senior banker caught while still working by the Financial Services Authority, now faces three years and four months in jail.

His wife, Angie, was given a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for two years. She will be electronically tagged for the first three months of her suspended sentence and will be under curfew at her home between 8am and 7pm.

The judge said she was under her husband’s influence was already suffering from “moderate depression and possible alcoholism”, and was a good mother to her three young children, aged three, five, and eight, according to a Reuters report. At least one of them has a serious medical condition.

“In my judgment, you did as you were told to do by your husband,” he said.

Sa’id received a two-year sentence, and will be deported to Singapore. He had already spent almost one year in jail since being extradited from the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean last March. 

 

a1admin [at] sph [dot] com [dot] sg?subject=Briton amassed $1.2 million profit with S porean wife from insider trading"><br/-->