Anti-insider trading planned

Anti-insider trading planned

MANILA (Reuter): Southeast Asian stock exchanges are finalizing plans to exchange information as part of their battle to stamp out insider trading, Philippine Stock Exchange president Eduardo delos Angeles said yesterday.

"The working arrangement is important especially when we were talking about insider trading where some of the parties may be foreigners," he said at a breakfast forum in Manila.

Exchange officials plan to meet in South Korea in November to work out a mechanism for exchanging information following a rise in intra-regional investment.

Delos Angeles cited cooperation with Kuala Lumpur over an insider trading probe into Interport Resources Corp of the Philippines, which is involved in a tie-up with Malaysia's Ganda Holdings Berhad.

Such cooperation could eventually evolve into a regional system of cross-border stock trading, an idea first broached by the Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tokyo exchanges, he said.

Exchanges in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are now also looking at a regional system linking the six members -- Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines.