THE Supreme People’s Court (SPC) reopened one of the country’s biggest insider trading cases at its No. 1 circuit court in Shenzhen on Wednesday after prosecutors protested the lenient penalties handed out by lower courts.

    Ma Le, a former fund manager of Bosera Asset Management Co. Ltd., one of the largest fund houses in China, was sentenced to three years in jail with a five-year reprieve for insider trading by Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court in March last year.

    Ma illegally earned 18.83 million yuan (US$3.04 million) from trading shares in 76 companies worth 1.05 billion yuan with insider information. All of his illegal gains were confiscated. Ma was fined an additional 18.84 million yuan.

    The case is the largest in terms of the trading period involved, the number of stocks and value of funds and profits involved since February 2009, China Daily said earlier in a report.

    Insider trading is the buying or selling of a security by someone who has access to nonpublic information about that security.

    According to the Criminal Law, traders who take advantage of nonpublic information in stock market transactions could face imprisonment of up to five years and fines of up to five times their illegal gains in serious cases. The prison terms can be extended up to 10 years in particularly serious offenses.

    The Shenzhen court said Ma chose to turn himself in, repented his crimes and was able to return all illegal gains and pay his fines. His actions were behind the lenient penalties, but prosecutors disagreed.

    Shenzhen’s prosecutors first filed a petition against the ruling. At the second instance, Guangdong’s higher court affirmed the intermediate court’s ruling as the final judgment in October. The prosecutors from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate protested it again two months later to the SPC.

    The supreme prosecutors said the ruling made by Guangdong’s higher court was an “erroneous application of the law” and that its sentencing was “inadequate.”

    “Based on the content of the judgment and protest, the dispute lies in whether the offense shall be defined as ‘serious’ or ‘particularly serious,’ as the latter should bring about more severe punishments including a sentence of up to 10 years’ imprisonment,” Pan Yueqing, a lawyer at Shanghai Shenhong Law Firm, was quoted by China Daily as saying.

    Ma’s case is one of more than 20 since 2013 when the China Securities Regulatory Commission strengthened probes into insider trading to restore confidence in the stock market and protect investor interests.

    The commission conducted 25 insider trading investigations in the first half of 2014, according to its latest half-year report.

    “The regulators have been very serious about preventing insider trading. Staff in my company receive warnings and cautioning materials on cases from time to time,” said Zhang Xufeng, a 24-year-old research specialist in a fund company. (Han Ximin)