If you've been reading this blog or my Compliance Week column for a while you may know that I am fascinated by that tiny subset of insider trading cases where people actually sit down and try to plan ways that they can obtain inside information on which they can trade. Hence my long-time focus on Mount Rushmore of Securities Fraud members David Pajcin and Gene Plotkin, who mapped out a detailed business plan to make money through insider trading, including:

actually hiring people via Craigslist to go out and get jobs at the plant that printed Business Week so that they could obtain and trade upon advance copies of the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column;

enlisting an investment banker at Merrill Lynch to provide them with ongoing information about imminent mergers and acquisitions;

persuading a friend serving on a federal grand jury convened to investigate potential accounting fraud involving Bristol-Myers to leak confidential information about possible indictments so that they could trade on it; and

planning to recruit exotic dancers in New York to seduce information about upcoming deals from their Wall Street clientele.

I'm not yet sure if this will turn into anything approaching the Pajcin/Plotkin case, but I am now keeping an eagle eye on a case that broke today in Sweden. The Swedish press reported today that charges were filed on Friday against six men in what is believed to be the largest insider trading scandal in Swedish history. Six men are alleged to have made profits of approximately 130 million kronor ($16.3 million) through illegal insider trading.

Most intriguing is the comment from Prosecutor Stig Åström of the Swedish Economic Crime Authority (Ekobrottsmyndigheten - EBM), who stated that the case is unique not only in its size but also because “it’s the first time a case has been tried in which people, as far as we can tell, consciously sought out inside information and used it systematically.”

If there are any Swedish readers out there who would like to become the official "Enforcement Action, Sweden Bureau" who can keep me posted on developments in this case, I'd be very grateful!