“Exante and Global Hedge frequently made illicit trades in the same securities, on the same days and around the same time,” said the US SEC.

Also, I believe this broker had a relationship with TradingView (related to MultiCharts).

https://exante.eu:443/press/releases/510/

Quoting 

Malta regulated prime broker, EXANTE, is allegedly involved in one of the largest financial cybercrime networks of all times. Dozens of traders from around the world, who seem to be linked to a hub in Ukraine, illegally traded on insider information stolen by hackers from newswires. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed fraud charges against over thirty people yesterday for being involved in the crime ring, and relayed that they were generating more than $100 million in illegal profits. According to the charges, Exante Ltd. holds proprietary trading accounts at Interactive Brokers and at Lek Securities, which were used in connection with the scheme to make trades resulting in approximately $24.5 million in ill-gotten gains. Exante is owned by Lartemisis Holdings Ltd which shares the same address as Portomaso Tower in St Julian’s, Malta. Its founder and CEO is Alexey Kirienko, who founded a public Global Hedge Capital Fund in 2007. According to his past description, the hedge fund contributed key technological infrastructure and knowledge base for the prime brokerage company, EXANTE Ltd. In its complaint, the SEC said that several of Exante’s directors are also owners of defendant Global Hedge Capital Fund Ltd., and the two entities share employees. “Exante and Global Hedge frequently made illicit trades in the same securities, on the same days and around the same time, and often through the same IP addresses,” the charges read. According to local reports in Malta, three of the company’s five directors have Maltese addresses; Bruno Cakans, Gatis Eglitis and Alexey Kirienko. The two other directors; Anatoli Knyazev and Vladimir Masliakov live in Moscow, Russia.

Source: Maltese Prime Broker EXANTE Implicated in $100M Insider Trading Scheme | Finance Magnates

Mike

SEC filing:

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2015/comp-pr2015-163.pdf

PDF is attached.

Mike

Big Mike 

Malta regulated prime broker, EXANTE, is allegedly involved in one of the largest financial cybercrime networks of all times. Dozens of traders from around the world, who seem to be linked to a hub in Ukraine, illegally traded on insider information stolen by hackers from newswires.

@Big Mike,

Big update on this one -- the SEC dropped all charges against EXANTE in February 2016, about six months after the original filing. FX Explained covered the resolution pretty thoroughly.

Here's what actually went down. The SEC lumped EXANTE in with the bad actors, calling them a "hedge fund" -- except EXANTE is an execution-only broker. They don't trade client money, don't take proprietary positions, don't make investment decisions. They fill orders. That's it. You can't be guilty of insider trading when you're literally just pressing buttons for clients.

The real scheme? Ukrainian hackers broke into Business Wire, PR Newswire, and Marketwired, grabbed corporate earnings before they went public, then sold access to traders in Russia, Ukraine, Malta, Cyprus, France, and the US. A small group of those traders happened to have EXANTE brokerage accounts. The full case (SEC v. Dubovoy et al.) ended up hitting 32 defendants and over $100M in illegal profits -- one of the biggest financial cybercrime busts ever.

EXANTE cooperated with the SEC, helped ID the bad actors, and the SEC eventually admitted they got it wrong on the broker classification. Charges dismissed.

They're still operating today -- MFSA (Malta), FCA (UK), CySEC (Cyprus), SFC (Hong Kong). All the research I've gone through shows the broker came out clean on this.

Worth knowing the full story here, because the original headline paints a very different picture than what actually played out.

TGIF! Have a good weekend!

-- Fi
"Headlines move markets. Corrections don't."