Ex-Investment Banker Charged With Insider Trading

(Bloomberg) -- Christian Littlewood, a former banker at Shore Capital Group Plc and Commerzbank AG’s Dresdner Kleinwort, and his wife have been charged with insider trading by the U.K. financial regulator.

Littlewood, faces 13 counts of insider trading with his wife, Angie Littlewood, the Financial Services Authority said today in a statement. A third suspect from Singapore was arrested in the Comoros Islands, a French territory off the coast of Africa, in connection with the case, the FSA said.

Last week the agency won an insider-trading case against Malcolm Calvert, an ex-partner at JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Cazenove unit. It was the first time the regulator successfully tried a finance professional after previously convicting a former company lawyer and a brokerage intern and his dentist father in two other cases.

“This is the sort of case that the FSA should be bringing in order to achieve effective deterrence, rather than cases against a dentist and intern,” said Angela Hayes, a London- based regulatory lawyer at Mayer Brown LLP, who isn’t involved in the matter. “The FSA is on a roll at the moment. Not only has it upped its employment of people with criminal-prosecution skills, but it is also using senior criminal barristers.”

Seeking Extradition
Littlewood and his wife are charged in connection with trading of shares listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market between 2000 and 2009, the FSA said. The FSA is seeking the extradition of the third person, the first time it has asked for a suspect in a criminal case to be sent to the U.K.

Littlewood, a senior corporate finance adviser at Dresdner until 2003, was arrested in April 2009. He left Shore Capital shortly after, according to the FSA’s register.

No contact information for Littlewood was available and the regulator couldn’t provide contact information for his lawyers. No one was immediately available to comment at London-based Shore Capital.

The FSA said separately today that it and the police had contacted 1,000 people on a “master list” used by scammers in boiler-room schemes. Boiler rooms are fake brokerages, often based overseas and beyond the reach of the regulator, which target investors with high pressure sales tactics to sell shares that turn out to be very risky or worthless.