JP Morgan settles with trader fired over wrongful allegations of market spoofing
JP Morgan has settled with a trader, who was wrongly fired from his job for market spoofing, after the bank failed to pay a £1.58m sum awarded to him by an employment tribunal in January.
Ex-trader Bradley Jones was awarded £1.58m after an employment tribunal ruled he was wrongly fired from his £220,000 a year job after being accused of market spoofing.
The tribunal in January also ordered JP Morgan to give Jones a new job in a similar role to his previous trader position.
JP Morgan had faced the prospect of another hearing in court after the Wall Street bank failed to pay Jones the £1.58m and failed to hire him back to an equivalent position in its Hong Kong offices.
However, Morning Wire understands the Wall Steet bank has now settled with the trader out-of-court for an undisclosed sum.
The claim comes after JP Morgan’s surveillance systems flagged a series of trades Jones made on 6 January 2016.
The trades saw Jones enter and then delete two sell orders for shares in Swiss company Logitech in quick succession at around 3pm that day.
The bank’s surveillance systems immediately identified the trades as potential market abuse, leading to Jones being interviewed by JP Morgan’s management.
No further action was taken against Jones at the time, after an internal investigation concluded the trader had not engaged in spoofing the markets.
However, Jones was later suspended from his job in December 2019, and fired in January 2020 for alleged “gross misconduct” relating to the 2016 trades.
Jones later filed a claim for unfair dismissal.
Judge Stephen Knight ruled JP Morgan had acted in an “unreasonable” manner as he claimed the bank “radically altered” its approach to the trader’s 2016 sell orders.
JP Morgan and Jones declined to comment.