Former Logica advisor guilty to insider dealing

Ryan Willmott, a former financial manager at IT-firm Logica, has pleaded guilty to insider trading. In the run to the deal, he irregularly dealt with shares, taking a profit of around £30,000. Willmott will be sentenced later this month.

Logica was a multinational IT and management consulting firm that had its headquarters in the UK. In 2012 it was taken over by the Canadian CGI Group for $1.7 billion, and since acts as a wholly owned subsidiary of the CGI. While the acquisition is now some years behind us, controversy surrounding the deal have come to light as the former group reporting and financial planning manager of the IT firm recently admitted guilt in his irregular dealings around the sale of the company – pleading guilty to three counts of insider trading.

The firm’s ex-financial manager Ryan Willmott was caught by the FCA. According to the FCA, Willmott secretly set up a trading account in the name of his girlfriend and had a friend make trades on his behalf – using his foreknowledge of the impending takeover deal to make a tidy £30,000 profit.

Willmott is awaiting sentencing on March 26, with the maximum sentence a fine and seven years in lockup. "Those who are entrusted with inside information commit a serious breach of trust by disclosing or trading on that information,” said Georgina Philippou, the FCA’s acting director of enforcement and market oversight. “This case shows that using others to try to cover up that breach of trust does not prevent detection. The FCA will not stand by when people take part in opportunistic insider dealing.”