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Seven ordered to pay £3.25m under insider trading investigation Operation Saturn
Seven men have been ordered to pay nearly £3.25m after they were found guilty of insider trading as part of an FCA investigation code-named Operation Saturn.
The men – Ali Mustafa, Pardip Saini, Paresh Shah, Neten Shah, Bijal Shah, Truptesh Patel and Richard Joseph – have already received custodial convictions for insider trading relating to the shares of companies including Reuters, Premier Oil and Biffa.
They had used information obtained from the print rooms of JP Morgan Cazenove and UBS.
Today, the men – all of whom have been released apart from Joseph – received confiscation orders totalling £3.25bn.
Joseph has been ordered to pay the largest sum – just over £2.17m – while the others face sums ranging from nearly half a million to around £4,000.
The sums are greater than the amount each man was convicted of profiting from, because the court is able to assume “the profits from other trading that took place within the same period represent the proceeds of crime”.
The FCA's director of enforcement and financial crime Tracey McDermott said: “The FCA has made it clear that we will use all of the tools at our disposal to ensure that our markets are clean. These individuals engaged in a sophisticated scheme to try and make easy money by exploiting inside information.”
She added:
As a result they have not only lost their liberty, their livelihoods and their reputations but they have also now been ordered to pay significant sums in confiscation.
This should be a clear message to others that insider dealing does not pay.