14 Jun 2016

Peter Binning comments on former Schroders trader sentence in The Times

A former City fund manager cried yesterday as he was sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading in nine companies over nearly a decade.

Damian Clarke, 40, made more than £150,000 between 2003 and 2013 by using his job as an assistant fund manager at Schroders Investment Management to trade on inside knowledge of upcoming takeovers and mergers.

The conviction is the third for insider dealing in two months. Last month Martyn Dodgson, 44, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank, and Andrew Hind, 56, an accountant, were jailed for four and a half years and three and a half years, respectively.

The convictions of Dodgson and Hind were the last from Operation Tabernula, the largest insider trading investigation by the UK authorities, in which several bankers, fund managers and traders were arrested and charged for dealing confidential information.

“The FCA will be pleased to have achieved a far swifter result against Damian Clarke than the lengthy and only partially successful Tabernula case, which came to a conclusion last month,” Peter Binning, a partner at Corker Binning, the law firm, said.

Read the full article in The Times here.