Former Swiss Bank Chief Sanctioned for Insider Trading
Swiss Bank Chief Sanctioned for Insider Trading by Regulator
(Bloomberg) --
A Swiss bank’s former chief executive officer has been sanctioned by the country’s financial regulator for insider trading in his wife’s name and for what Finma called other “serious breaches of supervisory law.”
The man executed the trades of shares of a separately listed company using his wife’s account at other lenders for several years, violating his bank’s internal directives, Finma said Friday in a statement. The identities of the bank and its ex-CEO weren’t disclosed, as is often the case in Switzerland.
Illicit profits of 730,000 Swiss francs ($752,000) were confiscated and he also faces a four-year ban from management roles and a six-year ban from securities dealing, the regulator said.
Insider trading wasn’t a crime in Switzerland until 1988 and although the country’s regulators have bolstered penalties they still remain lax by the standards of the U.S. or U.K. While Finma says it coordinates investigations with Swiss prosecutors where appropriate and possible, it declined to comment on whether the case had been referred to local judicial authorities for criminal prosecution.
The man used insider information he’d obtained by virtue of his role at the bank and had disclosed that privileged information to others, Finma said. He used that to systematically break the bank’s compliance rules “through other private trading activities,” Finma said.
--With assistance from Jan Dahinten.
To contact the reporter on this story: Hugo Miller in Geneva at hugomiller@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser
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