U.S. Loses Inside-Trade Suspect by Filing in Wrong Language

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. lost hold of a former investment banker wanted on insider-trading charges after it filed an extradition request for him in the wrong language.

Benjamin Taylor, 35, was arrested in Monaco and was being held pending the request, Monaco’s prosecutor Sylvie Petit-Leclair, said in a telephone interview. But a Monaco court rejected the request in May because it had been filed only in English, Petit-Leclair said.

The language of Monaco, a principality in the southeast corner of France, is French, and the country’s criminal code specifies that extradition requests must include a French translation. The U.S. filed an amended request, but by that point Taylor had left Monaco, Petit-Leclair said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment on the extradition request. A lawyer for Taylor couldn’t immediately be located.

Taylor is one of six people indicted in related cases announced last week. He allegedly played a key role in a plot to steal and trade on market-sensitive information from Moelis & Co., the investment bank where he worked.

Taylor and Darina Windsor, his then-girlfriend, sold information on 22 companies that they gleaned at work to two middlemen who aren’t identified in the Sept. 9 indictment, prosecutors claim. The middlemen then passed the tips to securities traders who would profit before the information became public, according to prosecutors.

Taylor and Windsor got more than $1 million in benefits, including cash, luxury watches and expensive clothes, according to the government.

--With assistance from Franz Wild and Chris Dolmetsch.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gaspard Sebag in Paris at gsebag@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Katz at akatz5@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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