Boss at one of Microsoft's largest resellers quits, admits secret share deals Neil Murphy, the boss of Bytes Technology Group – one of Microsoft’s largest cloud and software licensing resellers – has quit with immediate effect, at the same time admitting to making secret stock trades in the company. London Stock Exchange-listed biz confirmed yesterday that Sam Mudd is being appointed as a caretaker …
"he has made a number of trades in the Company's shares that had not been disclosed to the Company or the market in compliance with the PDMR disclosure requirements"
Even in London, that doesn't sound like he's going to have a good time with the authorities. At the very least he's going to have explain why he didn't disclose those trades and I don't think that those will be very comfortable discussions.
After all, he's not a politician, so he does not benefit from the Boris Johnson aura of invulnerability . . .
Yup, even as a lowly peon in a bank, we had regular training on buying & selling shares and the relevant regulations. While working at an investment company, everyone was considered an "insider" (frankly I think they just found it easier than trying to unpick who /might/ know some insider info and made it a blanket thing) and had to get permission to buy/sell shares. It's inconceivable he wasn't aware he needed to tread carefully around buying/selling shares, especially of the company he was on the board of.
..why the onus on declaring the shares is on him though, surely when you buy shares (if they are shares and not options) your name goes along with the purchase...is it not trivial to detect that someone who shouldn't be buying the shares has bought the shares? Is this not what KYC is for?
There's an awful lot of people who are restricted from trading in shares. If you work for a brokerage, or if you're on the board (or senior management) of a company. So I don't think there's a central list to check against. But even if there was - many of those people are allowed to own shares, there are just restrictions on when they're allowed to buy them.
So it actually isn't trivial to know whether someone is allowed to own shares or not.
That's before we go down the rabbit hole of people using third-parties or buying shares in their wives' / childrens' / friends' names in order to get round these restrictions.
"There's an awful lot of people who are restricted from trading in shares"
Yes and an awful lot of them trade anyway...I know that as a rule Lloyds bank forbids any of their trading staff from holding or trading cryptocurrency...most of the people that I know that work(ed) there do it anyway. It all seems very arbitrary and the rules only seem to kick in when you "make too much". Make a few thousand, nobody bats an eyelid, make millions everyone loses their minds.
It all seems like it is designed to prevent people new people becoming rich rather than preventing actual fraud.
The whole "you can work for us as a trader, but you can't trade anything yourself" thing comes across as being a bit like "you can be a Linux engineer for us, but you can't use Linux at home".
Also, why the fuck would I trust a trader / broker with my money when they aren't allowed to risk their own capital? Surely, the best traders are the ones that regularly experiment on the markets and risk their own capital to work out new strategies?
If all of this bullshit was ironed out and simplified we'd have fewer Jim Kramers in the world...and more actual experts.
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