Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA) secured its biggest proceeds-of-crime haul on Monday when it was granted permission to confiscate 1.5 million pounds ($2.35 million) from a former Dresdner Kleinwort banker and his wife.
In October 2010 Christian Littlewood, his wife Angie and a family friend, Helmy Omar Sa'aid, pleaded guilty to eight counts of insider dealing in shares listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) between 2000 and 2008.
Christian Littlewood is serving a 40-month prison sentence. His wife was sentenced to a year in prison, suspended for two years, while Sa'aid was sentenced to two years.
Southwark Crown Court approved an order to confiscate 1.534 million pounds from funds and assets restrained by the court when the Littlewoods were arrested.
A previous confiscation order for 640,000 pounds from Sa'aid brings the total to 2.174 million pounds, the FSA's biggest haul for an insider dealing case, and in excess of the profit from the indicted trading, the watchdog said.
The confiscation order assumes that profits from other trading within the same period also represent proceeds of crime.
"A key part of our strategy is to ensure that those who are convicted of insider dealing do not keep their ill-gotten gains," said Tracey McDermott, FSA director of enforcement and financial crime.
If the Littlewoods don't pay up within six months they will be liable to serve an extra three years in prison. They were also ordered to pay costs of 33,000 pounds each to the FSA.
Christian Littlewood was earning up to 1.5 million pounds a year from his day job and the couple had bought a number of houses in the upmarket Hampstead area of London.
It was the FSA's eighth confiscation order for insider dealing since its first in 2009, two years after the watchdog launched its "credible deterrence" crackdown on market abuses.
The FSA is considering applying for confiscation orders in two other cases.
British trader James Sanders, owner and director of now-defunct brokerage Blue Index, and his wife Miranda were jailed in June after scooping almost two million pounds from illegal share dealings.
Six members of an illegal UK trading ring that netted 732,000 pounds were jailed in July in a case that cost the FSA 5 million pounds to bring to trial.
The FSA is currently prosecuting four other individuals in separate insider dealing cases.
Money obtained under confiscation orders is split between the government, to pay for what are often lengthy trials, and the FSA, which has devoted considerable resources to building a case.
