Feb 5, 2011
Couple amass fortune from insider trading
By K. C. Vijayan
Littlewood was jailed for 40 months - a record sentence in Britain - while his Singaporean wife Angie, seen above with him on Wednesday, received a suspended sentence. -- PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
CHRISTIAN Littlewood was a London banker earning £400,000 (S$820,000) a year, but that did not stop him wanting more.
He used information from his office to get his wife Angie Lew Siew Yoon and friend Helmy Omar Sa'aid, both Singaporeans, to make £590,000 in profit from illegal insider trading.
The profits helped the Littlewoods build up a £3 million property portfolio in some of London's best neighbourhoods.
The most serious case of insider trading to come before a British court, in which the trio traded multiple shares over an eight-year period, was clearly motivated by nothing other than greed, a Crown Court judge found.
Judge Anthony Leonard told Littlewood, 37, that although he lived a lifestyle 'well beyond the contemplation of most, your desire to amass yet more wealth meant you could not resist making use of the sensitive information you had'.
'No other case has matched this one in its scale, in the position you held or in the profits made,' said the judge in sending him to jail for 40 months, the stiffest insider dealing sentence to date in Britain.
'Your acts were deliberate and inevitably dishonest. The level of planning and sophistication was high, as was the speed with which the information was passed on and the trade made for maximum profit.'
Littlewood's wife, Angie Lew Siew Yoon, 39, was given a suspended one-year jail term on account of being the mother of their three young children aged two, five and eight.
Helmy, 34, was sentenced to 24 months' jail on Wednesday. In April, he became the first foreign national successfully extradited to Britain to face charges of insider trading after being arrested in the French territory of Mayotte.
Helmy was also ordered to pay £640,000 by the court for his earnings from the scam.
The Littlewoods face a further court hearing as London's Financial Services Authority (FSA) is seeking to confiscate £1.5 million from each. The actual amount will depend on the profits made, the share value and the costs in prosecuting them, an FSA spokesman told The Straits Times.
The couple have also had their assets frozen pending the confiscation hearing. All three pleaded guilty to eight counts of insider dealing related to trading in a number of different London Stock Exchange and AIM listed shares between 2000 and 2008, said the FSA.
Littlewood, a senior investment banker who previously worked for investment banks Dresdner Kleinwort and Shore Capital, spied on colleagues' computers and eavesdropped to cull information which he then passed on to his wife and Helmy.
They then bought shares in several firms that were the subject of takeovers before they were announced. The news of an impending takeover subsequently led to increased share prices, at which point the Singaporean pair would sell the shares for a handsome profit.
The scam continued from March 2000 to August 2008 involving investments of up to £2 million on which they netted some £590,000.
Littlewood got his wife to use her maiden name, Lew Siew Yoon, to buy the shares in order to avoid detection.
Littlewood's claim that most of the deals were done by his wife and Helmy cut no ice with the judge who found the trades were based on his information.
Prosecutors also produced evidence which showed he was the dominant half in the decade-long marriage and had made use of her.
Among other things, an e-mail from Lew to her husband in 2002, read out in court, said: 'When are you going to stop being calculative? You have never been proud of me. All you care about is for me to bring lots of money to you.'
Also discovered was a floppy disk in the Littlewoods' garden shed which contained spreadsheets detailing a 'Payout for Christian' of more than £100,000 from several share trades and details of the cut each had made from other deals.
Commenting on the case yesterday, an FSA spokesman said: 'It is significant because it is the first time the FSA successfully prosecuted a banker who was working in the City (of London). When he was arrested he was still working as an investment banker.'
Taken from : http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?t=86667
All ang mohs are caring husbands after all, I am enlightened.
