Archive for the ‘Norway’ Category

Five people, including Fred Ingebrigtsen, the founder of the Scandinavian investment house Acta, are under investigation in what police on Monday called one of Norway’s biggest insider trading cases.

According to police four men, one woman and two companies face preliminary charges of illegal transactions with Acta shares worth 100 million kroner (US$20 million) as part of an organized crime network.

Ingebrigtsen, is charged with misusing inside information about Acta by sharing it with other defendants. All of them allegedly enriched themselves by using the information to make timely and fortunate share transactions.

The alleged insider trading involved Acta shares worth around NOK 100 million, making it Norway’s largest insider trading case to date.

Police and financial authorities in Norway reportedly have been investigating the case since February, when the Norwegian securities regulation agency (Kredittilsynet) reported its own suspicions to police. A conviction for insider trading as part of an organized crime network carries a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison.

Olav Braaten, defense attorney for Ingebrigtsen, nonetheless said his client was “shocked” by the charges against him, and by police raids at Acta offices and the homes of those charged. “He (Ingebrigtsen) says he hasn’t given insider information to anyone,” Braaten told newspaper Aftenposten, adding that several of the share transactions involved are more than three years old.

The raids and charges sent Acta’s stock into a steep dive, on top of heavy losses last week and a 57 drop in share value since New Year. The company already had suffered bad publicity and a rebuke from Norway’s finance minister after Aftenposten reported how Acta had engaged in aggressive marketing aimed at potentially vulnerable retirees.

Ingebrigtsen himself has been pressured by his creditors to sell all his own Acta shares. A report to the Oslo Stock Exchange Tuesday morning said that Ingebrigtsen had sold off the rest of his shares for NOK 8.50. That’s down from nearly NOK 40 per share in February of last year.

CSA Partners visited Oslo Stock Exchange, several leading law firms and listed companies to get an understanding of the market abuse situation in Norway.”We learned that the insider regulation in Norway is strict and the local FSA is doing the market monitoring with a really good care,” said Martin Villig, Managing Partner of CSA Partners. He added that the CSA Partners team will definitely visit Oslo again very soon to meet with the local securities market authorities and some other leading law firms to discuss about possible co-operation.

Please feel free to contact us if you would be interested in the INSIDeR products demonstration as well as meeting with the CSA Partners in Norway.

The rules introduced by MiFID impose complex requirements on banks’ and investment firms’ organizational governance and internal compliance management.

CSA Partners is delighted to announce the release of the new INSIDeR Professional Edition, a complete internal compliance procedures and records management solution designed to meet the most challenging requirements on organizational governance of MiFID-firms.

INSIDeR Professional Edition is web-based special-purpose compliance management application designed for the implementation of high quality internal control procedures and workflows by MiFID-firms when, among other things, dealing with the following organizational requirements:

• Administration of the list of relevant persons and persons and corporations with close links to relevant persons
• Applying pre-trade clearance regime and keeping records on permissions with regard to personal account dealings (personal transactions) by relevant persons
• Keeping records on personal transactions
• Controlling and reducing the risks of Market Abuse
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• All the above available on the basis of self-service-model to multiply the efficiency of compliance procedures management across the organization.

INSIDeR Professional will be available on the basis of software-as-a-service model where CSA Partners provides the hosting, support and management of the solution for MiFID firms. That relieves firms from the burden and cost of maintaining and updating in-house systems and IT infrastructure. INSIDeR Professional Edition is available also per in-house installation model, should internal policies rule out software-as-a-service option.

“The Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) represents the most extensive reform ever seen by the European financial services industry. Key objectives of the MiFID include an increased level of investor protection and the integrity of markets throughout the European Union. These objectives have warranted the introduction of a range of organizational requirements and procedures for MiFID-firms. INSIDeR Professional is our response to help MiFID-firms’ compliance teams to deal with the most challenging of them, says Martin Villig, Managing Director of CSA Partners.”

UPI.com wrote that a high-profile Norwegian public relations executive was sentenced Wednesday to the country’s toughest jail term ever handed out in an insider-trading case.

Rune Brynhildsen, who also once ran Norway’s leading private radio station, P4 Radio Hele Norge ASA, was sentenced in Oslo City Court to 10 months in jail. The judge also ordered him to pay more than $17,000 in court costs, Oslo’s Aftenposten daily reported.

It was a stiff sentence by Norwegian standards, where the longest previous insider-trading term jail was six months, the newspaper said. Brynhildsen’s attorney said he would appeal the conviction.

Brynhildsen was found guilty of leaking information about three companies his firm was advising. He was also convicted of urging a friend to buy stock in a company before the public release of information that caused the stock price to rise.

Prosecutors had sought a jail term of two years and eight months for Brynhildsen, his friend Dag Eriksen and another person charged in the case, Aftenposten said.

The Local writes that “Several million” kronor in cash was found at the home of one of the two main suspects in a major insider trading operation.

One of the men arrested on Monday works for investment company Cevian Capital, while the other works for Nordea Bank. Prosecutors have requested that both men remain in custody until detention proceedings are held later this week.

Mats Wilhelmsson, former head of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen – FI), expects further revelations of insider trading to follow.

“If there was one, why shouldn’t there be more,” he said.

Wilhelmsson was still working at FI when the investigation into the current affair began. He is not surprised by speculation that this may be the largest insider operation ever discovered in Sweden.

“That was the feeling we had at the time, that this had the potential to be one of the biggest things we had ever seen,” he said.

There has been much speculation in the media that Swedish authorities first began looking into the matter in connection with the purchase by search service provider Eniro of its Norwegian counterpart Findexa in autumn 2005.

A trial is currently underway in Norway of individuals suspected of having prior knowledge of an impending deal and buying shares in Findexa before Eniro made its bid.