ABSTRACT
Attorney General’s Reference (No 1 of 1988) HL This was a reference on a point of law arising out of the acquittal of the defendant on a charge of insider dealing under the Company Securities (Insider Dealing) Act (CS(ID)A) 1985. The defendant had sought to buy a block of shares in a public company but negotiations with the vendors had fallen through and the deal was off. An employee of the merchant bank advising the vendors told the defendant that the vendors were selling to another named party and that that, in itself, was confidential pricesensitive information because this deal had not yet been made public. In spite of that warning, the defendant bought shares on the stock market before the public announcement of the sale which he later sold at a profit. At his trial, he argued that there was no case to answer since he did not ‘obtain’ any information from the merchant bank’s employee; the CS(ID)A 1985 required secondary insiders (tippees) to have obtained the inside information from a primary insider, which he argued imported some more active element than was present in this case – he merely passively received the information – it was freely volunteered to him.
