I taught you value of information and how to get it,” yelled Gordon Gecco (Michael Douglas) to Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) in the iconic 1980s movie Wall Street. Those few words constitute the whole vortex around which the movie is predicated. And while insider trading is a major felony in developed securities markets, it is an open practice in Lebanon. In fact, insider trading is not illegal Lebanon. No law exists to prohibit people benefiting from privileged information – good or bad – before it hits the markets, only one which prohibits price manipulation (a practice not necessarily based on leaked information but on an artificial shake-up of any given market, usually by a sudden buy-up of stock). The American financier Ivan Boesky, and our very own Samir Trabulsi (involved in the Pechiney Affair in which the French government was found guilty of insider trading and which led to the
