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(Bloomberg) -- A personal trainer accused of insider dealing funded his partner’s trading account using a Covid-19 loan designed to help businesses survive the pandemic, a London jury was told on Friday.
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Rogerio de Aquino is one of four accused of insider trading at a London trial that started this week. The Financial Conduct Authority alleges that the defendants made a profit of almost £1 million through trades on at least 11 stocks. All of the defendants have pleaded not guilty.
“He applied for a Bounce Back Loan, got it for £50,000 pounds and £40,000 of it went straight into the trading account,” Tom Watson, a lawyer for the FCA, said.
Redinel Korfuzi, a former Janus Henderson Group Plc analyst that the FCA says was at the heart of the insider trading ring, was a client of de Aquino and had three to four sessions with him a week.
An account in the name of the trainer’s partner was used to act on insider information Korfuzi obtained in his job, the FCA alleged.
De Aquino “logged into the accounts almost every night and when he saw they were making substantial profits — as they did — he just assumed Mr. Korfuzi was a successful trader.”
Dema Almeziad, a university lecturer that was in a relationship with de Aquino at the time, is also charged with insider dealing, along with Korfuzi’s sister Oerta.
De Aquino told the FCA after his arrest in 2021, that he and Almeziad wanted to save up for a house deposit and that Redinel Korfuzi suggested they invest what they had in an IG Group Holdings Plc trading account that he would manage. There was a verbal agreement that Korfuzi would receive around 5% to 10% of the profit, prosecutors said.
Almeziad said “she and Rogerio had struggled financially, him particularly with the impact of the pandemic,” Watson told the jury. De Aquino said in his police interview that the couple knew little about finance and that “they were ‘two idiots’” that left Korfuzi to handle the trading.
The FCA alleges that the four defendants used information about share placements that Korfuzi learned from his role at Janus Henderson to place highly leveraged short bets across a number of different accounts.
The Bounce Back Loan Scheme was established by the UK government to help businesses struggling with the impacts of Covid-19. The loans could be for as much as £50,000, and are covered by a 100% government guarantee.