Corbyn candidate was sent to jail for £120,000 insider trading
A NEW Labour parliamentary candidate in a high-profile seat was once jailed for a £120,000 insider trading scam with his dentist father.
Matt Uberoi, 34, is running against Conservative Greg Hands, a former chief secretary to the Treasury, in the London constituency of Chelsea and Fulham.
Labour hopes he will become a lawmaker in the December 12 poll – yet, in 2009, he was given a one-year sentence for lining his and his father’s pockets while on a university placement at a merchant bank.
When contacted by the Daily Mail, Mr Uberoi said he would have been fully within his rights to keep his conviction secret.
But he and Labour both said he had instead been ‘upfront and honest’ about his jail term to the local and national party and had learned from his mistake. He already serves as a councillor.
Southwark Crown Court in London heard that, in 2006, Mr Uberoi, from Fulham, was studying at Bath University.
As part of his course, he was put on a six-month placement at Hoare Govett, the brokers of Dutch bank ABN Amro.
Inside the bank, he became party to inside information about forthcoming company takeover bids, which would lead to share prices rocketing.
Such information is supposed to be strictly confidential – but Mr Uberoi soon began feeding it to his father Neel, then 59, who had been a dentist in the NHS for 35 years before moving into private practice and who lived in Kenley, Surrey. In a bid to keep their plot secret, Mr Uberoi sent his father online messages supposedly about buying food from a Chinese restaurant. In fact, they were tips to buy shares which the student knew were about to rocket.
Mr Uberoi sent messages saying ‘Get involved with Chinese now’ and ‘Let’s have as much Chinese as we can. Today will be the last day we can do this’ and ‘All looks good on the Chinese front, think we should stock up.’
He tried to maintain in court that he was a regular customer at a Chinese restaurant in Croydon and that he had not garnered any insider information.
He first encouraged his father to buy shares worth £90,000 in pharmaceutical firm Neutec Pharma – knowing in advance he would be able to sell them just eight days later for £200,000 when the firm was bought by giant Swiss company Novartis.
They made £10,000 more from Mr Uberoi’s tips about takeovers of engineering and oil companies, buying and selling hundreds of thousands of shares.
Pleading not guilty, Mr Uberoi said he had only attended a general talk about laws surrounding secrecy and never heard anything at a relevant meeting.
But the court found them guilty of 12 counts of insider trading in just three months.
Father and son were both jailed in 2009, the dentist for two years, Mr Uberoi for one – although he was freed after three months.
A spokesman for the London Labour Party said: ‘Matt Uberoi will be a strong advocate for Labour’s plans to govern our society in the interests of the many, not the elite few. He has been honest and upfront about the serious mistake he made 13 years ago and has shown his deep and genuine remorse.’