A former broker at Novum Securities received a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to insider-trading charges.
In a move that the Financial Conduct Authority will hope provides an incentive for others under investigation to co-operate, Graeme Shelley avoided jail time by admitting to trading 14 stocks using inside information between 2008 and 2010.
His is the second sentence arising out of the largest FCA insider-trading investigation to date, codenamed Operation Tabernula, Latin for "little pub".
He and his alleged co-conspirator netted profits totalling more than £400,000, enabling him to pay for a Range Rover and a luxury holiday to Oman, Southwark Crown Court heard on Thursday.
Ruby Hamid, for the FCA, told the court that Shelley would meet his co-conspirator, Paul Milsom, a former equities dealer at Legal & General Investment Management, in pubs across the City several times a month to split profits from their insider dealing. Shelley would hand over as much as £50,000 cash a time to Milsom.
Milsom would tip off Shelley about large block trades that LGIM was about to make, which "were of a such magnitude that they had the ability to move the market", Ms Hamid said.
Milsom pleaded guilty to similar insider-dealing charges last year and is serving a two-year prison term.
Shelley, dressed in a dark-blue suit, spoke only to confirm his guilty plea.
His barrister, Patrick Gibbs QC, said that his client had entered the City as a trainee after leaving school and had a 31-year career during which he had built up "a reputation and client following".
"At the conclusion of these proceedings he will have absolutely nothing to show for it," he said.
The court heard that Shelley and Milsom would use pay-as-you-go mobile phones to contact one another, and that Shelley was assiduous in keeping notes of the trades and a schedule of payments to Milsom.
When Shelley was arrested as part of a high-profile series of raids in March 2010, the regulator found the schedule in his jacket pocket.
Judge Alistair McCreath said he drew a distinction between Milsom, who was the "insider" in possession of the information, and Shelley, who facilitated the trades.
"The conduct . . . has about it a considerable degree of care and skill in the way in which it was carried out," Judge McCreath said during sentencing. "The notion that this kind of offence has no victim is a nonsense; it undermines the integrity of the market. It involved a breach of trust."
He also imposed a confiscation order of £588,000.
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