Christopher Gent fined £80,000 by FCA for disclosing inside information

theguardian.com:

Sir Christopher Gent, the former chief executive of Vodafone and ex-chair of GlaxoSmithKline, has been fined £80,000 by the UK financial watchdog for disclosing inside information to shareholders while chair of the medical-devices maker ConvaTec.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Gent, one of the most prominent figures in British business, after ruling that he shared information relating to a revision of the financial performance of ConvaTec and plans for the retirement of its chief executive to senior individuals at two of the London-listed company’s biggest shareholders.

“Private disclosure of inside information, especially by the chair of a listed issuer, risks investor confidence and the integrity of financial markets,” said Mark Steward, the executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA. “Sir Christopher failed to properly apply his mind to the question of what information he could properly disclose.”

In its 53-page ruling, the FCA said that Gent breached his fiduciary duties and committed “market abuse” by sharing the information about ConvaTec – which listed on the FTSE 250 in 2016 – before it was revealed in a public stock exchange announcement in October 2018.

At the time Gent shared the information, the company’s brokers had said that more information was needed in relation to the revision to financial performance guidance and no announcement should be made until it had “sufficiently precise information”.

Gent, who left the company in a restructure in 2019, also told one of ConvaTec’s brokers and a board level executive at the company that “he was intending to call, and/or had called, the major shareholders”.

ConvaTec had a relationship agreement with one of the major shareholders