Jake's View | The hypocrisy of a crime that is not a crime
Hapless Tiger Asia executives pleaded guilty to insider trading but there would have been no offence if they had bought rather than sold
A Hong Kong court ... ordered US hedge fund Tiger Asia Management and two senior executives to pay more than HK$45 million to about 1,800 investors for insider dealing of shares in two Hong Kong-listed mainland banks in 2008 and 2009.
I wonder what it feels like to stand up in court and plead guilty to a crime that you know is a not a crime, that only regulators with scant familiarity of the industry they regulate could ever dream of as a crime.
What does it feel like to have your lawyers tell you that you have no choice, that this just happens to be the way the law works, that justice has nothing to do with it and that you can expect little sympathy from a judge who may also not understand and is in any case hemmed in by previous rulings?
The helpless rage it must produce was the lot last month of Bill Hwang and Raymond Park, the two senior officers of Tiger Asia who admitted insider dealing. It saved them from a possible prison sentence, which is the only reason I think they did it.
If it is inside information then no one … should have been allowed to deal on the basis of it
The miscarriage of justice here was occasioned when Tiger Asia was called by a corporate financier with an offering of a share placement in a mainland bank.