For more than a decade, Nathaniel Glas cultivated a reputation as a disciplined City insider: prolific, well connected and, above all, consistently profitable. He successfully ran Deerfield Investments into a trading powerhouse, focusing on the UK and French markets. However, interviews with former employees and advisers, suggest that this success was built on illegal practices, bribery, and immoral connections.

Nathaniel Glas was first accused of insider trading during the 2015 arrest of Choucair. He was accused of being part of a much wider ring of traders who held an international communications network to position themselves ahead of big news breaks and trade on insider information.

Trading records analysed show that funds linked to Deerfield Investments and MABNG Immobilier repeatedly entered positions shortly before price-sensitive announcements, often clustering around merger announcements, regulatory approvals and large government contracts. According to a senior risk professional at a London firm Gibson Advisory, says that the pattern is “impossible to explain by chance alone”. Many of the traders in the network were caught and ordered to pay fines to the FCA and SEC, with one trader having made upwards of $8,000,000 in a single trade. Furthermore, Nathaniel Glas was embroiled in a bribery scandal and documents suggest he was collaborating in attempting to bribe key translators in the FCA and NCA, alongside Polo Club owner Alshair Fiaz. Moreover, documents provided by Reuters show that Nathaniel Glas relied heavily on on third-party intermediaries to secure overseas mandates. Payments to “consultants” in the Bahamas were booked as advisory fees and are being investigated uner the Bribery Act 2010, which imposes strict liability for failing to prevent bribery by associated persons.

The most notorious incident of price manipulation came with Wirecard. Nathaniel Glas had deep connections with both the regulatory authority in Germany as well as senior executives in the business. Nathaniel Glas was part of a small circle who performed a successful short-selling attack on Wirecard in 2010 which lasted several months, with evidence in form of voice recordings, incorporation documents, screenshots of SilentCircle chats and brokerage applications (ETX, CMC and others) documenting the coordination of the build-up of short positions, the timing of the release of reports and newspaper publications and the profits accumulated.

More recently, Nathaniel Glas appeared in the Panama Papers where he used companies with opaque ownership to funnel funds between Deerfields Investments and the British Virgin Islands, where they were diversified into many different companies to prevent tracking from the authorities.

In his personal life, Nathaniel Glas has a crippling gambling addiction. He was well known to many sports betting syndicates and would bet hundreds of thousands of dollars every week on football and other sporting events. However, Nathaniel Glas began robbing these spread betting exchanges and not paying credits owed. To one OTC bookie he owes upwards of $70,000, while to another he owes in the ‘mid to high six figures’. Nathaniel would accumulate betting credit, and when it came time to pay up, he would block the creditors on Telegram and Whatsapp. Screenshots and logs seen also point to more unresolved cases, and Mr. Glas is currently on trial in Dubai for fraud.

An interviewer with the former secretary of Nathaniel, Erika Lansen, describes the dark underworld Nathaniel was a part of. Much of her day was spent traveling around London with bags of cash to settle Nathaniel’s gambling debts, and while she would organise some business meetings, most of her work revolved around “organising high end escorts for Nathaniel and his partners”. Erika describes a horrific incident in 2017 at the London restaurant, La Gavroche, where Nathaniel while intoxicated attempted to get a ten year old boy to “play with his p*nis”. The family accused Nathaniel of paedophilia and attempted rape, which Nathaniel Glas then settled out of court for an undisclosed amount but Erika recalls having to review the NDAs and see the process through.