FCA and NCA Arrest Three in Raids on Suspected Insider Dealing Group

The Financial Conduct Authority said three individuals were arrested on 13 October 2026 in a joint operation with the National Crime Agency (NCA) aimed at disrupting a suspected organised criminal group engaged in insider dealing and money laundering. More than 100 FCA and NCA staff took part in searches at five residential premises in London and Manchester, and FCA investigators seized more than 30 mobile phones, laptops and tablets during the searches.

All three suspects were being interviewed by the FCA at police stations in London and Manchester at the time of the announcement. The regulator said it could not comment further at this stage but would provide more details when appropriate.

Steve Smart, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said in the FCA’s announcement: “Insider dealing is a serious threat to the integrity of our markets. Working with partners, we will continue to use all the powers at our disposal to crack down on serious and organised crime groups engaged in market abuse.”

The FCA said anyone with information concerning insider dealing can contact it by phone on 0800 111 6768 or through its market abuse reporting form, and that information can be passed confidentially.

Enforcement Record and Legal Powers

The FCA said it secured four insider dealing convictions in 2025/26, two of which resulted in record sentences totalling 11 years of imprisonment. Twelve people were fined a total of £1.77 million for insider dealing, market manipulation and making misleading statements over the same period.

The regulator’s first-year results under its five-year strategy, published on 9 July 2026 alongside its annual report and accounts, recorded 17 criminal convictions, including for fraud, insider dealing, money laundering and DPA offences. The FCA issued 2,329 warnings about unauthorised or potentially scam firms in 2025, up from 2,240 in 2024, fined firms approximately £14.4 million for transaction reporting failures and control weaknesses, and issued a £42 million fine to Barclays for anti-money laundering failures.

Under the FCA’s market abuse framework, criminal insider dealing is an offence under Part V of the Criminal Justice Act 1993, while criminal market manipulation is an offence under sections 89 to 91 of the Financial Services Act 2012. Insider dealing, unlawful disclosure, market manipulation and attempted manipulation are civil offences under UK MAR, the market abuse regulation onshored into UK law on 31 December 2020. Criminal sanctions for insider dealing and market manipulation can incur custodial sentences of up to 10 years and unlimited fines. For breaches of UK MAR, the FCA can impose unlimited fines, order injunctions and prohibit regulated firms or approved persons. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 gives the FCA powers to investigate and prosecute insider dealing as defined by the 1993 Act.

The regulator carries out its own surveillance of financial markets, analysing transaction reporting data, order book data and benchmark submissions to identify insider dealing and market manipulation. Operators of UK trading venues must detect and report suspicious transactions and orders to the FCA through suspicious transaction and order reports, known as STORs. Persons professionally arranging or executing transactions must also detect and report STORs where they are registered or have their head office in the UK or, in the case of a branch, where the branch is in the UK.

The Case Behind the Record Sentences

The record sentences cited in the FCA’s announcement were imposed in the regulator’s prosecution of Redinel Korfuzi and his sister Oerta Korfuzi, who were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to six years and five years’ imprisonment respectively after being convicted of insider dealing and money laundering worth £1 million. The FCA announced the sentences on 4 July 2025.

Redinel Korfuzi had access, in his role as a research analyst at Janus Henderson, to confidential information likely to have an impact on companies’ share prices, and shared it with his sister, the FCA said. The case centred on 13 stocks traded between 17 December 2019 and 25 March 2021, which generated a profit of more than £960,000. The FCA detected suspicious patterns of trading and analysed large sets of trading data to uncover the crime. The siblings were arrested in March 2021 in a search operation carried out alongside the Metropolitan Police and were convicted on 19 June 2025 following an 18-week trial.

FCA investigators also uncovered an international money laundering operation in which 173 cash deposits were made into accounts controlled or operated by the siblings from the UK to Albania, including nearly £25,000 in English and Scottish bank notes found in two bags during the search of a safety deposit box in Knightsbridge; the source of the cash remains unknown. The FCA has begun proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 to remove the benefit of the criminality. Because the offences predate 1 November 2021, when the maximum sentence available for insider dealing increased to 10 years, the insider dealing in that case was punishable by a fine or up to seven years’ imprisonment, while money laundering is punishable by a fine or up to 14 years’ imprisonment.

Fighting financial crime is one of four priorities in the FCA’s strategy for 2025 to 2030, which commits the regulator to focus resources on those who seek, or have sought, entry to regulated financial services in order to use FCA authorisation as a cover for crime, including market abuse. The strategy states that over the previous two years the FCA charged more people with criminal offences than ever before, that it is concluding enforcement investigations faster, and that it is harnessing technology to better identify potentially abnormal trading in UK markets. It also commits the regulator to drawing on its relationships with domestic law enforcement and regulators to share intelligence and coordinate action, and to reporting by 2030 on improvements in its market cleanliness and abnormal and anomalous trading statistics.