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Cash transferred to bank accounts and safety boxes by a former analyst of Janus Henderson was “absolutely not” linked to prior knowledge trade, but was heard a court in London for payments regarding a family construction company.
Redinel Korfuzi, 37, and his co-suspects have been accused by the UK Financial Conduct Authority of money laundering of around £ 200,000 in cash generated via an Insider-Handeling scheme that reportedly made the group a total of approximately £ 1 million.
But he told the jury of the Southwark Crown Court on Monday that the money was actually gathered from British customers of his father’s Albanian construction company and that it was “very, very normal” for an Albanian to receive and pay for things in cash.
“Those cash would initially keep it a bit at home and when my father asked for it, I would send it to him … by the bank transfer,” said Korfuzi in his first day in the stands. It was “absolutely not” of criminal activities, he maintained.
Korfuzi is being charged alongside his sister, Oerta Korfuzi, 36, Personal Trainer Rogerio de Aquino, 63, and the girlfriend of the Aquino Dema Almeziad, 40, with one count of insider trade and one count of money laundering between December 2019 and March 2021.
The Financial Conduct Authority accuses Korfuzi of the use of information that he had obtained as an insider because of his former role at Janus Henderson to enable his fellow samplers to act and make a profit.
Prosecutors claim that the group scored nearly £ 1 million by illegal bets on stock prices in 2020 and 2021 of trading positions that have been removed on personal accounts in companies such as JET2, Hargreaves Lansdown and THG. The money laundering practices relate to more than 170 cash deposits.
Korfuzi told the jury that he grew up in Albania, where his father worked as an engineer and later set up a construction company after the Albanian financial crisis in 1997. His mother was a pediatrician.
He came to the UK in 2006 to study, after which he started working at Investment Management Firm Libra Equity in 2010, before he came to Aquila Capital in 2013.
Korfuzi said his family would travel to the UK with cash and that he had paid his rental and university costs in cash, which was “normal” in view of the high use as a method for payment in Albania.
The maximum fine for Insider trade at the time the violations took place was seven years in prison and 14 years for money laundering. The case continues.