Three employees of major banks have been arrested as part of a investigation of insider dealing sparked by intelligence from the leak of the panama papers, it has been claimed.
More arrests are planned in the joint-investigation by the FINANCIAL CONDUCT AUTHORITY (FCA) and the NATIONAL CRIME AGENCY (NCA), Bloomberg news reported.
The existence of the investigation was revealed in parliament earlier in the week.
The chancellor told the commons that HMRC’s panama papers taskforce had “identified a number of leads relevant to a major insider trading operation”.
A team of HMRC officials has been combing through the millions of documents leaked earlier this year from the Panamanian law firm Mossack fonseca.
The FCA and NCA both declined to comment on the report of arrests.
Their collaboration on the investigation recalls operation Tabernula, Britain’s biggest insider dealing investigation yet, in which the NCA carried out covert surveillance.
Among five operation Tabernula convictions to date, earlier this year Martyn Dodgson, a former deutsche bank corporate broker received a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence.
In a separate case, last week mark Lyttleton, a former BlackRock fund manager, pleaded guilty to two charges of insider dealing.
As well as leads on insider dealing, Philip Hammond said the Mossack fonseca trove had prompted criminal investigations of 22 suspected tax evaders and identified the hidden owners of 26 suspicious offshore companies used to hold UK property, among other breakthroughs for investigators.
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