A former Deutsche Boerse AG employee was handed a suspended sentence and must pay €163,000 for secretly trading on non-public information the Frankfurt stock exchange received from listed companies.

The man, who can only be identified as GP, was found guilty of 14 counts of insider trading between January 2018 and July 2021, Presiding Judge Eva-Marie Distler said delivering the verdict in Frankfurt on Thursday. The money seized equals the transaction prices, she added.

“You have grossly exploited the position trusted on you in your job,” Dister said. “That’s a tremendous amount of criminal energy you displayed.”

During the trial, the 53-year-old admitted using information Deutsche Boerse received 30 minutes before the filings were made public. He was working at the cash market operation unit which monitors the filings to decide whether it was necessary to suspend trading in a company.

Because of his early confession, the court sentenced him only to a term of one-and-a-half years which will be suspended.

GP was previously investigated over 154 cases and prosecutors have provisionally seized €1.3 million of his assets. Because it wasn’t fully determined whether all filings contained actual insider information, the prosecution was narrowed to 14 counts.

German financial regulator Bafin which monitors the Frankfurt trading didn’t spot his actions because his transactions were relatively small. The watchdog only noticed him when he targeted a company with very low trading volume, making him one of the top ten buyers at the time. That prompted Bafin to probe him.  

He always entered his trades at his job computer during working hours and nobody at Deutsche Boerse ever noticed anything or controlled what he was doing there.

“In a way, Deutsche Boerse has made it very easy for you,” said Distler. “We can only hope that Deutsche Boerse has taken action since then, also from a compliance point of view.”

Deutsche Boerse has industry-standard security and compliance measures in place, which are continuously reviewed and developed, a spokesman for the stock exchange said in an emailed statement. 

  - Bloomberg