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A former Goldman Sachs analyst convicted of insider trading and fraud must pay more than half a million pounds in confiscation, a London court has ruled.
Mohammed Zina, who was found guilty of insider dealing last year and sentenced to 22 months in prison, was ordered to pay £586,711 by a judge at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday, according to the court and the Financial Conduct Authority, which prosecuted the case.
The court found that Zina had benefited by £1.1mn from his conduct, which included insider trading and taking out loans fraudulently from Tesco Bank. Zina was ordered to pay the amount that was available from his current assets, according to the FCA and court records.
Zina, 36, was prosecuted alongside his brother, a former lawyer at UK “magic circle” firm Clifford Chance in one of the FCA’s most high-profile insider dealing cases in recent years. A jury unanimously found Zina guilty on all nine counts of insider trading and fraud.
Zina’s brother, Suhail Zina, was acquitted before the trial ended after the FCA withdrew the fraud counts against him and the court ruled there was no case to answer.
During the trial, the jury heard how Zina had made about £140,000 in profits from trading on stocks including semiconductor designer Arm and pub company Punch Taverns. His biggest gain was about £55,000 in profit on trades in US food company Snyder’s-Lance.
“I cannot help but feel pity for you, because you have thrown away what was undoubtedly a promising career in banking,” Judge Tony Baumgartner said at Zina’s sentencing in February last year. “Your reputation now is lost, and it is likely you will never be trusted to work in a position of such responsibility again.”
The Zina case was the first FCA insider dealing conviction for the agency in five years, after a fallow period for the regulator partly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and court backlogs. The number of insider dealing cases has picked up since then with a number currently going through the courts.
Zina has three months to pay the confiscation order. Failure to pay would result in a default prison sentence of five years.
“Insider dealing harms the integrity of our markets. As well as prosecuting insider dealers, we will not allow them to keep any part of their illicit profits,” said Therese Chambers, the FCA’s joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, in a statement on Friday.
A lawyer for Zina did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.ft.com/content/9e5a1b0f-0623-4333-9dbb-3237d2e3780d
