US regulators said Thursday they had busted a brazen Wall Street insider trading "ring" of 14 people, mostly from securities firms and hedge funds.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said it filed civil charges against 14 members of the ring who the watchdog claimed had netted over 15 million dollars in "illegal insider trading profits on thousands of trades."
The market regulator said the 14 defendants had profited illegally by stealing sensitive market information from major investment banks including UBS and Morgan Stanley, partly aided by members of the ring who worked at the two banks.
Members of the ring used inside the information to executive favourable stock trades netting millions of dollars in illicit gains, the SEC said.
One of the more senior individuals charged was Mitchel Guttenberg, 41, an executive director and institutional client manager at UBS' equity research department. Regulators said the ring went to exhaustive lengths in a bid to hide their improper trading activities.
The SEC, whose probe was aided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cited a "clandestine meeting at Manhattan's famed Oyster Bar," and said the ring also used disposable cell phones, secret codes and cash kickbacks.
Others charged included Randi Collotta, 30, a former Morgan Stanley lawyer who allegedly passed on market tips on deals to her husband Christopher Collotta, 34, another lawyer.
The SEC said its investigation was ongoing and that it was seeking financial penalties from the individuals involved.