UK Journalists use national newspaper
to manipulate stock markets

A jury at Southwark Ground Court in London was told that two financial journalists of UK’s Daily Mirror used its share tipping column to manipulate the stock market and drive up the prices of shares held by them.

James Hipwell and Anil Bhoyrull who wrote City Slikers column for the newspapers, would repeatedly “buy, tip and sell shares, hoping to profit from a rise in the price.

"What was going on, we say, was quite simple," he told jurors. "We say that the pattern - buy, tip, sell - is quite clear from the shares they bought and sold."

Mr Katz went on to allege that the pair had a clear and obvious conflict of interest, and that any tip that
appeared in the newspaper and "deliberately failed to disclose this conflict of interest" created a misleading impression of the value of the shares being tipped.

"The intentional failure by them to disclose what they were really doing is, as far as the two journalists are concerned, the most serious aspect of the case," he said.

The barrister cited, as an example, a £4,900 purchase of shares in Tottenham Hotspur by Mr Bhoyrul on
August 9 1999. The following day, he said, it featured in the paper as "tip of the day". The shares were then sold on August 17, and the rise in price - from 68.5p to 71p -netted a modest £59.90 profit. But Mr Katz also claimed that some of the columns had been factually misleading and untrue. He told jurors that one "graphic example" - taken from a column in December 1999 - had suggested that a company called Oxford Glyco Sciences had discovered an Aids vaccine.

In fact, he said, the company's patent manager would be called to say that there was "no truth whatsoever" in the claim.

The barrister also said that a third man, Terry Shepherd, had joined the alleged conspiracy at a later stage and helped to disseminate the tips through electronic bulletin-boards.

Mr Shepherd also began to give the journalists the names of shares which they should tip, and by the end of the period under consideration had became the main beneficiary of the scheme, Mr Katz said.

Both Mr Hipwell and Mr Shepherd deny the charge of conspiring with Mr Bhoyrul to create a misleading impression as to the value of the investments between August 1999 and February 2000.

Mr Bhoyrul is not standing trial. The case continues.