Telemaque Lavidas is the first of the accused to go before a jury in the U.S., where prosecutors say he was one of the people feeding information into a network of traders on several continents. His trial starts Monday in federal court.

In a scheme that stretched for years and included dozens of trades, participants cultivated ties to bankers, made bets based on information gleaned from them and shared leaks in face-to-face meetings or over encrypted social media apps such as Signal or WhatsApp, the government claims. The network was based on location and affinity, with some of the European traders saying they hung out together in clubs and in posh locales.

“The investigation to date has identified over 50 deals where the subject traders have engaged in suspicious trading, as a result of which the participants in the scheme have collectively made over $100 million in profits,” an FBI agent said in a 2017 affidavit made public last month.

Lavidas allegedly played a small role in the wider plot. He is accused of providing non-public, market-moving tips about Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. that he got from his father, Athanase Lavidas, a former Ariad board member and the chief executive officer of the family-owned Lavipharm SA. The younger Lavidas passed the tips to Georgios Nikas, a Greek businessman who owns restaurants in New York and used the information to make trades before big share moves, prosecutors said.

In exchange, the U.S. claims Lavidas got a $500,000 investment from Nikas’s wife in his fruit-bar company, Mediterra Inc.

Lavidas was among six people charged in October, when the U.S. announced a series of cases alleging insider trading by a loosely organized network of bankers, traders and entrepreneurs. Links also emerged between suspects in probes in the U.K. and France.

A key witness in Lavidas’s trial is expected to be Marc Demane-Debih, a Geneva-based trader arrested in Serbia last year. He pleaded guilty to 38 counts in a secret hearing in October. Demane-Debih agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in hopes of leniency when he’s sentenced.

Demane-Debih claims that Nikas told him at a 2011 dinner party that he had inside information about Ariad that he got from Lavidas and his father, the government said. Nikas has also been charged, but he remains in Greece and is considered a fugitive.

Lavidas’s lawyer, Jonathan Streeter, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the trial.

At a hearing in December, Streeter told U.S. District Judge Denise Cote that one defense will be that the Ariad tips that Nikas allegedly used to make his trades didn’t come from Lavidas, but from Darina Windsor, a former Centerview Partners LLC investment banker in London who is charged but not in U.S. custody.

While Lavidas is charged only with giving tips to Nikas about Ariad, prosecutors claim Demane-Debih provided Nikas with inside information about many companies. That suggests the Swiss banker may be a link to others accused of being in the ring.

FBI Special Agent Shannon Bieniek said in the 2017 affidavit that the government has been investigating an insider-trading network that involved residents of the U.S., U.K., France, Switzerland, Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Hong Kong since 2013. Shares of pharmaceutical companies were bought and sold before important news releases were issued, Bieniek said. Some media reports were “manufactured by the participants in the scheme,” she said.

In addition to Lavidas, Nikas and Windsor, U.S. authorities have charged Goldman Sachs investment banker Bryan Cohen with passing confidential information. Cohen, who’s free on bail and on leave from the bank, is scheduled to go on trial in Manhattan Feb. 4. He denies wrongdoing.

The U.S. also charged Joseph El-Khouri, a securities trader and avid poker player who lives in London and Monaco. He’s free on bail in London while fighting extradition to the U.S. Another defendant is Benjamin Taylor, a former Moelis & Co. investment banker who lived with Windsor in London.

Lavidas, a U.S. citizen, has been in jail since his arrest. Cote considered him a flight risk and rejected an elaborate $26 million bail package.

Trading in Ariad was based around four stock-moving events, which helped generate the illicit profit for Nikas, according to the government.

In June 2013, Lavidas allegedly told Nikas that the Ariad board had learned that one of its drugs, Iclusig, was going to be approved by the European Commission. Nikas bought thousands of shares and profited when the news was made public and Ariad shares surged 12%.

In September and early October 2013, Lavidas told Nikas that the Food and Drug Administration had concerns about Iclusig’s safety, according to the government. The stock fell 67% when the FDA’s concerns were reported.

Then, in November or December 2013, Lavidas gave Nikas a heads-up on an FDA decision to let Iclusig back on the market, which touched off a 16% increase, the U.S. claims. In July 2015, Nikas traded before public reports of a potential acquisition of Ariad that sent its stock up 41%, prosecutors said.

The case is U.S. v. Lavidas, 19-cr-716, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

But few could have expected the stock to face so stern a test less than a month after the company’s historic $25.6 billion initial offering.

The world’s most profitable company extended declines Monday after dropping to its lowest closing price yet a day earlier, as the U.S. killing of Iran’s most prominent general last week triggered fresh concern of a wider conflict in the Gulf region. The move suggests that rising oil prices — Brent crude has climbed above $70 a barrel for the first time since May on a closing basis — aren’t necessarily a boon for the energy giant.

Aramco fell 0.1% to 34.50 riyals on Monday, narrowing its gain since it listed on Dec. 11 at 32 riyals to 7.8%. It tumbled 1.7% Sunday.

While Aramco has performed better than Saudi Arabia’s benchmark Tadawul index this week, the sudden rise in geopolitical tension comes just as the end of the stabilization period for the shares nears.

“The risks will remain over the near term as both the United States and Iran aim threats at one another,” said Jameel Ahmad, a markets analyst at FXTM in London. The drop in Aramco shares “is a natural reaction to the coordinated risk aversion that has swept global sentiment since the events at the end of last week.”

The missile attack that killed Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump, was a reminder of the risks of investing in the region. In September, Saudi Arabia’s oil production was cut by half after a swarm of explosive drones struck some of its most important production facilities. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia blamed Iran for the attack, while Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility.

Aramco was back pumping 9.9 million barrels a day just one month after the attacks and the company pressed ahead with what was to be the world’s biggest IPO.

At the time of the sale, many foreign investors cited geopolitical risk as reasons to stay away from the shares, and considered them too expensive. Even after this week’s fall, Aramco has a valuation of $1.8 trillion, easily the highest among listed companies.

Aramco still has some built-in protection because the shares are mostly in the hands of those used to regional politics, mitigating selling pressure at times of tension. Saudi government institutions invested almost $2.3 billion in the IPO. The government also relied heavily on ordinary Saudis and funds from neighboring Gulf Arab monarchies to ensure the success of the offering.

On top of that, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is acting as share-stabilizing manager for the offering until the end of this week and can buy shares as part of that. It also has the right to exercise a so-called greenshoe option of 450 million shares, which would normally be used if the stock was rising too fast. No price-stabilization transactions had been executed as of Dec. 31, according to a statement from Aramco.

“Very few active managers are in the stock and most shareholders are either government-related entities, quasi-passive or passive,” said Marwan Haddad, senior portfolio manager at Emirates NBD Asset Management in Dubai. “Therefore volatility would be low unless an actual attack takes place, which we believe has a low probability. Moreover, as the oil price goes up, downside risk falls.”

Roughly three-quarters of the company’s trade orders last year were electronic, according to Stuart Riley, global head of operations and technology for the bank’s Institutional Clients Group. The ICG arm will add programmers in locations from New York to Chennai, India.

The hires reflect “what we are building in technology and why we are focused on making salespeople and traders more effective at servicing our clients,” Riley said in an interview at Citigroup’s Canary Wharf office in London. “Technology is augmenting what humans do by making better use of data.”

Global banks are investing billions in a race to apply technologies that make front-office staff more efficient and keep clients trading. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are among other firms that are hiring as computer specialists change the face of trading floors across Wall Street.

JPMorgan spends $11 billion on technology every year, while New York-based Citigroup budgets roughly $8.5 billion, or about 20% of total expenses. Bank of America Corp. has said it spends approximately $10 billion on technology, with about $3 billion of that going to new projects.

Citigroup has started reaping the benefits of those investments in recent years, saying they’ll help save as much as $600 million in 2020. The bank, which already has 23,000 technology specialists in its ICG business globally, said the new roles will be in London, New York, Shanghai, Toronto, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Pune and Chennai in India, and Tampa, Florida.

Tech giants are already waging a battle for talent in Citigroup’s hometown. Facebook Inc. said it’s planning to hire more than 3,000 people over the next three to five years in New York City, while Amazon.com Inc. announced plans to lease space in Manhattan that will house 1,500 workers.

Citigroup’s new recruits will work on projects including solutions in equities and fixed income, according to Riley. The bank has already used its tech teams to automate news, analytics, pricing and trade ideas for salespeople by drawing on their message exchanges with clients, Riley said.

About two years ago, the bank had 30 spaces for a Python coding class and was inundated with requests, according to Riley. It now has 1,600 front-office staff trained in the computer language.

Lalin Property announced today (January 6) its 2020 business plan, aiming to outgrow the industry’s average performance for the 5th consecutive year.

The company plans to launch 9 to 11 projects this year with a total value of Bt5 billion to Bt5.5 billion.

Sales target is set at Bt6.2 billion with Bt5.25 billion in estimated revenue realisation, or a 13-per cent growth year on year.

In 2019, Lalin achieved revenue recognition of approximately Bt4.64 billion, a 13.2 per cent increase from the previous year.

Chaiyan Chakarakul, the company’s executive chairman, shared his views on the overall situation of the residential property market in Thailand last year, saying that the market, especially that of the vertical housing property, had been sluggish due to a slowdown of the global and local economies, high level of household debt, and the loan-to-value (LTV) measure of the Bank of Thailand to rein in speculation.

These factors negatively affected the vertical market of which demand came from investors and speculators, more than the horizontal market.

However, Lalin has always been assessing the market and has long foreseen this risk. The company, therefore, stopped developing condominium projects two years ago and is now focusing on horizontal projects which are a source of real demand.

This timely adaptation allows the company to grow amid the stagnant real estate market.

In 2020, it expected the Thai economy to expand by the same rate as last year or slightly better, or plus or minus 3 per cent.

The supporting factors are stable low interest rate, larger government investment after the delay in 2019, various measures to stimulate the property market, and policies to encourage Thai people to buy their residences through low-interest loans from government banks.

The company is hopeful that these factors will boost the residential property market in the first quarter of 2020 while entrepreneurs will stimulate purchases through intensive marketing activities.

It is estimated that the horizontal real estate market in 2020 will grow by 2-4 per cent.

The company’s business direction in 2020 will focus on ‘real demand’ of the residential horizontal market with plans to launch more projects in new high-potential locations and to replace existing projects that will gradually be closed down.

Churat Chakarakul, Deputy Managing Director, added that Lalin strives to be one of the top 3 brands in consumers’ mind when it comes to low-rise housing in the price range of Bt2–6 million.

The company has set a land acquisition budget of Bt1 billion to Bt1.2 billion, coming from company cash flow and accumulated profits. The working capital, aside from the cash flow, will come from the issuance of debentures and short-term loans from financial institutions.

Around 68.4 per cent of the respondents did not expect the economy to improve this year, while 31.6 per cent was of the opinion that the economy would fare better this year.

Of those who did not expect an improvement, 29.6 per cent said the economy was expected to slow down, while 25.5 per cent expected flat growth.

Meanwhile, 40.2 per cent of the respondents said the digital disruption would pose a challenge to business this year.

Of the total, 81.6 per cent said they would go ahead with business plans while 51.5 per cent would focus on developing business platforms for new revenue sources.