City banks probe audio live feed cheating claims

GIANT banks in the City have launched urgent investigations into whether their traders used leaked audio feeds from the Bank of England to make money.

Traders are feared to have accessed an illicit audio feed from press conferences at the Bank to get information ahead of their rivals.

The feed supplied live audio from statements on interest rates, inflation and the economy by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, up to eight seconds before they were officially broadcast by media outlets such as the BBC. Traders could then cash in by placing bets on the financial markets before other investors reacted to the news.

HSBC and JP Morgan are understood to have had access to the high-speed feed, which is thought to have been supplied by a little-known news provider. It is not known whether staff used the feed to make money. Last night a senior source at one of the biggest banks in the City told The Mail on Sunday: ‘All banks will be looking into this issue.’ Danny Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee, accused City firms of ‘cheating’ if they bought the information.

He called on the Financial Conduct Authority regulator to launch a fullscale investigation, including a probe into which institutions bought access to the feed.

Blanchflower said: ‘We need to be reassured that this has stopped, and we need to be reassured that nobody at the Bank knew about this.’

The existence of the high-speed feed was revealed last week by The Times newspaper. The firm that supplied the audio feed has not been identified. But an Essex-based firm called Statisma News is reportedly a focus of an inquiry at the Bank.

HSBC and JP Morgan declined to comment.

Statisma News denies wrongdoing.