Posts Tagged ‘Finantsinspektsioon’

BalticBusinessNews writes that Swedbank employee suspected of insider trading. Anton Uustalu, 27-year-old former employee of client relations department of Swedbank, is one of the suspects in insider trading scheme with Eesti Telekom stock.

Priit Perens, general manager of Swedbank Eesti, said that he could not comment the case and suggested that Äripäev asked the prosecution for comment. “Uustalu left on the mutual agreement,” was all that Perens said, without elaborating why Uustalu’s employment contract was terminated.

The Baltic Cource wrote that the North Estonian District Prosecutor’s Office sent to court a criminal case accusing a prominent Estonian businessman Toomas Tool and former SEB bank broker Karoly Kirber of manipulating the securities market, namely the share price of real estate company Arco Vara.

Tool is being accused of, while being an authorised representative of his wife, giving selling orders of a large amount of shares at a SEB account connected to his wife, to SEB bank broker Karoly Kirber on July 14-21, 2008. The order specified selling the shares at a price that became gradually lower. The aim of that was to bring the market price of Arco Vara share below 0.56 euro, which enabled Tool to influence other large owners of Arco Vara in making decisions.

New York Times wrote that Estonian prosecutors charged Dmitri Vassiljev, a former analyst at SEB Enskilda, with using inside information to trade shares and options of the Baltic telecommunications companiess Eesti Telekom and TEO.

Mr. Vassiljev used information on TeliaSonera’s offer to buy out minority shareholders in the two companies to which he had access to before it was made public, the Tallinn-based state prosecutor’s office and Financial Supervisory Authority said Thursday in separate statements. Eesti Telekom rose 23 percent and TEO jumped 30 percent after the offer was announced
August 24th.

Comments from CSA Partners:

This case highlights the importance of proper systems and controls that investment banks and advisors should have in place in order safeguard inside information from their customers.

In particular:

• every member of the staff should be exposed to the information only on a need to know basis;
• flow of inside information should be rigorously controlled and list of insiders, with exact date and time when information was received, maintained;
• each employee who has obtained the access to the information, should be alerted about the fact that the information received, is inside information;
• adequate personal account dealing controls (e.g. list of restricted instruments) should prohibit members of the staff from making transactions (directly or via related persons) with securities issued by the customer.