In the UK, the
Financial Services Authority is now working closely with the Serious Organised Crime Agency following evidence that organized criminals are becoming increasingly involved in financial frauds such as insider trading. The Financial Times
reports that criminal groups view insider trading as lucrative and, despite increased enforcement by the FSA in the last years or so, low risk.
Paul Evans, Soca’s director of intervention, said he and others believed that "City fraud was in a sealed jar,” but organized crime has had other ideas. Evans told the FT that law enforcement agencies are looking closely at people such as bankers and lawyers who may be the “facilitators” of links between the worlds of finance and organized crime. “There are people with Janus personalities,” he said. “They face the public and they look compliant. But they face the criminals and they look useful.”
The threat of financial fraud by organized crime is a relatively new concern in the UK, but has been on securities regulators' radar screens for over a decade in the US. In 1997, high-profile stories about Mob activity on Wall Street appeared in The New York Times and Business Week. As discussed in detail in the September 200
Congressional testimony of then-Enforcement Director Richard Walker, these articles were closely followed by a series of criminal indictments and civil prosecutions of securities law violators with alleged connections to organized crime, including a May 1997 FBI sting operation against a reported Colombo crime family associate.