Briton amassed $1.2 million profit with S'porean wife from insider trading

Greed was the clear motivation for the most serious case of insider trading to appear before a British court.

After all, Christian Littlewood, an investment banker who made his way up the ranks to director at Dresdner Kleinwort, had already been earning £400,000 (S$820,000) a year. And yet he still used information gleaned from the office to make £590,000 in profit from illegal insider trading.

He made his Singaporean wife Angie, 39, to use her maiden name, Lew Siew Yoon, to buy the shares in her name to avoid detection. She teamed up with her Singaporean friend, Helmy Omar Sa'aid, in using her husband's price-sensitive tip-offs to trade 2.15 million pounds worth of shares.

All three pleaded guilty to eight counts of insider trading for the scam that they had been doing for eight years - from 2000 to 2008 - at different London Stock Exchange and AIM listed shares.

Christian Littlewood, the most senior banker caught while still working by the Financial Services Authority, now faces three years and four months in jail.

His wife, Angie, was given a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for two years. She will be electronically tagged for the first three months of her suspended sentence and will be under curfew at her home between 8am and 7pm.

Sa'id received a two-year sentence, and will be deported to Singapore. He had already spent almost one year in jail since being extradited from the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean last March.

ORIGINAL SOURCE