Trading ahead of deals falls to decade low Trading ahead of mergers and acquisitions in the UK last year dropped to the lowest level in nearly a decade, according to the City watchdog, as abnormal price movements preceded 19.8 per cent of all deals. The Financial Services Authority said the figure for trading ahead of UK deals has now dropped by a third over the past two years, after running at close to 30 per cent for most of the 2000s. The fall coincides with a concerted campaign by the FSA to prosecute insider dealing and deter the leaking of confidential financial information. The watchdog has won 14 criminal convictions for insider dealing since 2009, including those of James and Miranda Sanders, spreadbetters who are before the court for sentencing this week. The FSA is also prosecuting 11 other people and continues to investigate a handful of City professionals who were arrested but not charged in high profile raids in 2010. Last year the agency handed down its largest ever market abuse fine to an individual when it fined Rameshkumar Goenka, a Dubai-based investor, $9.6m for manipulating the closing price of India's Reliance Industries securities to avoid losses on a structured product. Under the leadership of Hector Sants, the outgoing FSA chief executive, and recently departed enforcement chief Margaret Cole, the regulator adopted a philosophy of aggressive enforcement to provide "credible deterrence." That is clearly a good figure. We are pleased with that," Mr Sants told the Financial Times after the publication of the annual report. I believe we have certainly persuaded people that the FSA should be taken seriously. But some of the cases have proved controversial - most notably one involving David Einhorn, the hedge fund billionaire, who called the £7.2m fine for market abuse fine on him and his Greenlight Capital management company "unjust." Ian Hannam resigned in April as chairman of equity capital markets at JPMorgan Cazenove to fight FSA allegations that he leaked information about a client to a potential investor. Not all trading ahead of deals reflects illegal market abuse - some is due to media speculation and unrelated trading strategies and some is simply statistical noise. The UK is unusually transparent about the cleanliness of its markets - US regulators do not make similar statistics public. The statistics were released as part of the FSA's annual report, which also revealed that Mr Sants was paid £835,731, including £143,000 in bonuses, and Ms Cole received £615,939, including £113,000 in bonuses in her final year at the regulator. Lord Turner, who now serves as executive chairman, was paid £500,474 and did not receive a performance bonus. The enforcement division is expected to continue its hardline approach when a new chief is selected and it is spun out of the FSA into the new Financial Conduct Authority as part of broader UK regulatory reforms next year. Martin Wheatley, who will head the FCA, was paid just less than £400,000 including performance bonuses for the seven months he was at the regulator from September 2011.