Banker Says He Wiped Texts to Hide Links to Suspect in Spy Death

(Bloomberg) -- A former trader on trial for deleting Whatsapp messages while under arrest said he removed the app because it had details of his links to a former Russian agent who’s a suspect in the 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko.

Konstantin Vishnyak was arrested in 2018 as part of a now-discontinued insider-trading investigation, U.K. prosecutors said on the opening day of his criminal trial Monday. The former banker deleted the application “in a panic” before handing the second of his two iPhones to officers. lawyers said.

The 42-year-old former banker and trader is charged with one count of destruction of documents that he knew to be relevant to the investigation. He’s pleaded not guilty and said the deleted chats had no information related to insider trading.

Instead, the content of the messages was “far more embarrassing,” Vishnyak’s attorney, Patrick Gibbs, told the jury Monday.

Vishnyak was exchanging messages with Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian politician who’s wanted by British authorities for the murder of former Russian security officer Litvinenko, Rachel Barnes, a lawyer for the FCA said.

This is the FCA’s first prosecution in connection with the alleged destruction of documents under Financial Services and Markets Act of 2000, the agency has said. The charge carries as much as two years in prison.

Vishnyak was under investigation for insider trading in relation to six companies that got takeover bids. The FCA says that he deleted the WhatsApp application on his iPhone just minutes after his arrest in September 2018.

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