Inside the downfall of trading titan and Blackpool FC owner Simon Sadler
He was a heavyweight in Hong Kong finance and a hometown hero. Now he faces the possibility of jail
It’s match day in Blackpool, and the Armfield Club is preparing for a busy one. The venue is close to the football stadium and, in recent years, has been turned into what is perhaps best described as part pub, part shrine to Blackpool Football Club. The Armfield’s pool table is the same tangerine colour as the team’s kit. So are its chairs, window blinds, the handrail on the stairs and the bunting lining the upstairs bar.
“You must be looking for Raggy,” a customer calls over. “You don’t look like a lady that would normally come in here.” Fair enough. Though I grew up just an hour away and am no stranger to pubs on match day, I work for the Financial Times in Hong Kong these days and have lost at least some of my accent. Raggy is a grinning, baby-faced Blackpool FC devotee in his early forties, who helps run the Armfield and who will almost certainly never lose his.
When he greets me, he does so in a voice so uncompromisingly northern — with its flat U’s and missing H’s — that if I heard it anywhere else in the world, I would stop to ask where exactly the speaker was from. His full name is David Ragozzino. Besides his day job as a food hygiene manager at a local biscuit factory, Raggy is a key figure among the Muckers, a Blackpool FC fans’ group. As such, he has insights on Simon Sadler, the club’s owner since 2019.
Sadler was born and raised in Blackpool, a working-class seaside town in north-west England, but left after school. Over three decades, he became a trader, set up a hedge fund in Hong Kong and established himself as one of the most powerful players in a lucrative niche of global finance. He came to oversee billions on behalf of investors and made hundreds of millions of pounds for himself. But he never lost sight of his hometown. Sadler’s hedge fund, Segantii Capital Management, was named after a pre-Roman tribe believed to have inhabited the area. The company’s logo was tangerine. So were its spreadsheet headers, even Sadler’s filing cabinet. Six years ago, he capped it all by rescuing the ailing Blackpool FC.
“Local lad makes good” was more or less the team owner’s legend around the Armfield until May 2024, when criminal charges were announced against him in Hong Kong. Sadler, 55, is accused of insider trading, in a case that has struck at the heart of the “block trading” model on which he built much of his fortune. If convicted, he faces up to seven years in prison.
After Raggy has shown me around the Armfield, he tells me about Sadler, whose relationship with Blackpool fans has soured of late. Raggy says he and Sadler have met a few times, and the owner has been to the Armfield. “I’m aware of people like ’im,” Raggy says. “You can’t question ’em; there’s no questioning.”
Segantii did not respond to requests for comment for this story, which is based on conversations with almost 70 people connected to Sadler’s world. Shortly before publication, lawyers representing Sadler said that, as the criminal proceedings concerned their client, he was not able to respond to many of the allegations put to him for comment. They added that does not mean that he accepts them as true.
Raggy has work to do and suggests I come back after the game. At the time of my visit, Blackpool FC are in transition. They have just fired their head coach, after losing the first two games of the season, and have not yet named a permanent replacement. Today, the team manage a 2-2 draw and, afterwards, the Armfield is heaving with fans in tangerine shirts, sinking pints and laughing. I sit with some supporters, who offer to buy me a beer. When I ask for a half-pint, I am handed a full one. (No one ever orders a half at the Armfield, so there’s no way to charge for it, I’m jokingly told.)
I thought I’d be the one asking questions, but the fans have found out they’re sitting with someone who has seen Sadler in court and who should, in theory, be able to explain what a hedge fund is. There’s a lot they want to know: how serious is his legal situation? Did he do anything wrong? Is the Chinese Communist party after him? Will he have to sell the club? And can he pay to make the problem go away? On the last question, the answer looks a lot like no.
It is the early 1980s, and lunchtime at Warbreck High School is boisterous. Teenage boys run free, shouting, laughing, fighting, playing football. Warbreck is a 10-minute drive from the town centre but can feel a million miles from the festivity of the amusement arcades that line Blackpool’s seafront. Caning is a trusted disciplinary tool here. Unlike some schools, where only the headmaster is allowed to administer corporal punishment, any Warbreck teacher can, so long as it is entered in the “punishment book” and a witness is present.
In an upstairs science classroom, the school chess club is meeting. About 20 boys are sitting quietly, eating packed lunches and contemplating their next move. Simon Sadler is one of them. In a game that requires staying several steps ahead of his opponent, he shows talent. Sadler comes from a working-class family with a suburban home. His father Tony once ran market stalls where everything cost 50 pence, earning him the nickname “Ten Bob Tony”. (Under Britain’s pre-decimal currency system, 50 pence was equal to ten shillings, or “ten bob”.) The local football club plays nearby, and Tony takes his son.
Sadler grows up listening to Duran Duran and the Sex Pistols, and sometimes hangs out at the arcades, drowned in flashing lights and the sound of clattering coins. He seems especially skilled at winning money on the fruit machines. Blackpool is still riding relatively high. Millions of British tourists arrive in summer for donkey rides on the beach, fish and chips, and other amusements.
These are the Margaret Thatcher years, an era of financial deregulation during which ambitious yuppies are all over television. Ordinary families are being encouraged to become capitalists by buying their council homes and shares in the newly privatised British Telecom. Warbreck is a non-selective state school with an intake so broad that some kids end up at university and others end up in prison. Sadler is one of the former, earning a degree in management sciences in Manchester and a springboard into professional life.
Jonny Hodgson pointed his index finger in Simon Sadler’s face so closely it was almost up his nose. Sadler had been shouting at Hodgson, who worked for him at Segantii, and Hodgson wasn’t going to take it any more. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again, the former rugby player told his boss. It was around Christmas 2014, and the two men were in the middle of Segantii’s office on the 21st floor of a glass tower in central Hong Kong. Other traders began staring.
It wasn’t rare for Sadler to yell at his employees, but it was rare for them to fight back. Hodgson looked like he “was going to knock the guy out”, said a person who witnessed the altercation. (Hodgson declined to comment.) Sadler said Hodgson should leave, and shortly afterwards he did. Later, Sadler sent Hodgson a text message, which Hodgson showed to a friend: “For the record, you are one of the most useless, arrogant c*nts that I have ever worked with . . . Merry Xmas, Simon.”
Sadler arrived in Hong Kong in 1999, the year he turned 30. Britain had handed control of the territory to China two years earlier, but it still had a reputation as a place where young expat financiers could make a lot of money and party hard. After stints at Deutsche Bank and HSBC, he started Segantii in 2007.
Other hedge funds had been ploughing cash into China’s fast-growing tech companies. But, for the most part, Sadler was not investing based on global megatrends or companies’ fundamentals. Segantii was all about trading, making money while taking limited risk. It had a mathematical, technical approach. At that time in Asia, “everyone you met basically was long Alibaba and Tencent. Simon was offering a different product,” a person who knew him said. It was “not what the sexy hedge funds were doing”.
Sadler would later tell colleagues that he’d seen his father lose money betting, which some thought could’ve shaped his approach to risk, though it wasn’t clear how much had been at stake. Sadler’s lawyers said his approach to risk was not shaped by any betting by his father.
It was not unusual for Sadler to use the c-word at work. He’d even say it in front of colleagues’ children, according to several witnesses. A group of Segantii employees jokingly took to calling themselves the “hopeless and useless c*nts”, adopting Sadler’s phrase. When one staff member discussed writing a book about life at Segantii, a colleague suggested he could call it “The C*nts of Queen’s Road Central”, a play on The Wolf of Wall Street.
“Our client vehemently denies using the word ‘c*nt’ in front of his colleagues’ children at work,” Sadler’s lawyers said. In the event children were ever present, they added, he denied “having knowingly used profanities.”
Sadler’s profanity reflected what a former employee described as a “me against the world” mentality. “Everybody has had the hairdryer treatment from him,” recalled a banker who dealt with Sadler. Several former employees said that, when Segantii’s founder was on the trading floor, a frightened silence descended. “I have seen him break down employees into tears in front of the entire floor,” one said.
Sadler’s lawyers said, “Our client denies ever seeing anyone crying or ‘in tears’ on Segantii’s trading floor. To the contrary, Mr Sadler took great pride in the professional development of his employees.”
Over the years, Sadler hired a colourful cast of characters. If they didn’t have a nickname when they arrived, they soon got one. There was Damage, real name David Sayer, who hailed from Essex and said the sobriquet referred to the dotcom crash. There was Rocket, a fresh-faced trader from New Jersey called Daniel La Rocca, who handled Sadler’s orders at a fast pace. Sadler labelled one colleague “Kermit”, saying that, like the frog in the fable of the scorpion and the frog, he was too trusting. And there was Gags, a talkative Brooklynite born Robert Gagliardi. Sadler did not seem to have a nickname.
Segantii was a place where a successful trader could earn a multimillion-dollar bonus in a single year. Several former traders used the phrase “Stockholm syndrome” to describe how they felt about working for Sadler. “I have a soft spot for him,” one former employee said. “But I don’t know why.” Another said he’d learnt not to take the shouting and swearing too seriously: “He’s all fart, no poo.”
By 2008, Segantii was managing about $39mn from investors, including wealthy individuals and “funds of funds”, which pool money. After the financial crisis, banks couldn’t make as many bets with their own balance sheets. They needed an outsider who could take risk off their hands, and Sadler’s trading expertise meant he was perfectly placed to help.
At its simplest, “block trading” means trading big chunks of a given company’s stock. This can happen if a large shareholder wants to sell their stake, such as when a private equity firm is holding shares in a company that it has taken public. (Such groups often have to hold on to their stake for a “lock-up” period after the listing.) Block trades are often privately negotiated between bankers acting for the seller and hedge funds interested in buying, typically at a discount to the stock’s trading price.
The rules of supply and demand dictate that a big block being sold can often push down the share price. But hedge funds have at least two ways to make money from them. One is to simply buy the block at a discount and sell it for more later. The other is far more complicated.
If a hedge fund suspects a block trade is coming, it can short-sell the stock — in other words, placing a bet that the price will fall. To short a stock, you borrow shares from someone else and sell them right away. Later, you have to buy shares back to return them to whoever you borrowed from. You hope that, by then, the price has fallen enough that you can buy at a lower price than you sold for, pocketing the difference. (Of course, if the price rises, you have a problem.)
Because blocks are sold at a discount, a hedge fund anticipating an upcoming block sale could short the company, then plan to buy the discounted shares in the block itself to cover their position. How a hedge fund might come to know or suspect a block trade is in the offing was a significant greyzone in which Segantii made enormous profits.
Ten Bob Tony sat, straight-faced, amid rows of chairs in Sotheby’s Mayfair auction house. It was November 2014, and Sadler’s father had instructions from his son, whose hedge fund was then close to managing $1bn, to buy a piece of Blackpool FC history. Tony had started to get used to the idea that his son was making previously unimaginable sums of money. Sadler later told people that his father once asked him to transfer a million pounds into his bank account, just so he could see what it felt like, a request they said Sadler said he’d granted. Sadler’s lawyers acknowledged his father asked him for a significant sum, but denied the transfer was ever made.
The auction item of interest was the 1953 FA Cup winner’s medal that had once belonged to Stanley Matthews, perhaps the most celebrated British footballer of his era. The medal’s owner had paid £20,000 for it 13 years earlier, and it was expected to fetch £50,000 to £60,000. When the bidding opened, Tony calmly raised his red plastic paddle to counter each price rise. Soon, the bids had blown well past the auctioneers’ top estimates. “He was deadpan about the whole thing,” said Graham Budd, who ran the auction. “He looked like a man on a mission.” Eventually, Sadler’s father won with a bid of £220,000, enough to buy a comfortable home in Blackpool.
Around that time, Blackpool FC experienced a dramatic rise and fall. It briefly sat at the top of the Premier League in 2010, an astonishing feat for a scrappy club with a budget far below England’s mega-teams. But by 2016, Blackpool had been relegated three times, landing in the fourth tier of English football. The club’s then octogenarian owner, Owen Oyston, became a hate figure for many fans. They stopped play by throwing tangerines and tennis balls on to the pitch. Other times, they threw eggs at the directors’ box.
Eventually, they boycotted matches. “Oyston out” became a common refrain and was printed on to tangerine scarves. Oyston and his son Karl responded to the vitriol by, among other things, suing individual fans. They filed a defamation suit against Raggy over posts he’d made about them online, for instance, winning an entitlement to £20,000 each.
Raggy said he “strongly disagreed with the way that case was handled and the outcome”. Karl Oyston told the FT he had been reluctant to sue but did it to prevent further “attacks on my family”. His father said he’d apologised for taking legal action, that he “came in for a lot of flak and made mistakes but also made things happen” such as reaching the Premier League.
By then, the fortunes of the club’s hometown had also declined. The tourist trade dwindled as families hopped on budget flights to Mediterranean resorts instead. As nationwide austerity measures cut funding for public services, antidepressant prescription rates in Blackpool, a town that built its name on carefree fun, were among the highest in the country. Life expectancy was the lowest.
On the other side of the world, Segantii was flying high. It had become a dominant force in Asian block trading, acting with such frequency and at such scale that it became almost impossible for the world’s biggest investment banks to ignore the firm. “They were literally the first port of call for everybody,” a banker who dealt with Segantii said. “They always had the most information on the street. Everybody spoke to them.”
Plenty of banks and hedge funds try to prepare for upcoming block sales, and it is possible to do so using public information, such as the expiry dates of lock-up periods. Information-sharing beyond that can be complicated. Bankers selling blocks need to talk to potential buyers to see how much they might pay. But if a hedge fund knows a block of a company’s stock is about to be up for sale when others do not know this, it has an opportunity to profit by shorting it.
So-called “wall-cross” arrangements are intended to protect potential buyers and sellers. They are formal agreements in which an investor receives private information from a bank, in exchange for restrictions on its ability to trade on that information. Once a wall-cross has taken place, any insider trading on the information in question would be relatively easy to track down and prove.
However, before a hedge fund will agree to be wall-crossed, it might ask for preliminary information about the stock in question. These pre-wall-cross conversations take place in a greyzone. Can a banker divulge the country where the stock is listed? What about the sector the company operates in? If a hedge fund is fielding calls from multiple banks gauging its interest in blocks of the same stock, can it put the pieces together? And if a trader thinks, but doesn’t know for sure, that a block trade is coming based on those clues, is that inside information? Until last year, Hong Kong regulators had few precise answers to these questions.
Segantii had expanded and called itself a “multi-strategy” hedge fund. But Sadler was mostly focused on blocks, as well as ADR arbitrage, an often complex type of trade that centres on the different prices investors are paying for exposure to the same company in different countries. “Trying to speculate about when a block trade could happen, so he could be pre-positioned, was part of his strategy,” said another banker who dealt with Segantii. “He was trying to read the market.”
Sadler did so impeccably. In its first 15 years, Segantii had just one lossmaking year. In its best years, it generated returns of 30 per cent or more, putting it well ahead of the average for hedge funds in the region.
In 2017, Segantii made some small trades involving Esprit, the fashion retailer listed in Hong Kong. A US hedge fund called Lone Pine Capital wanted to sell its 10 per cent stake and, around June 14, Tony Psarianos, who worked on Bank of America’s sales and trading desk in Hong Kong, spoke to Segantii. It is not clear exactly what information he shared about the block, or potential block. But Segantii, which had a long position in Esprit, sold at least some of that exposure and made a separate short bet against the company. (Bank of America declined to comment.) Lone Pine sold its stake on June 15, with Esprit’s shares falling consistently over the next few days.
Staff from the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), Hong Kong’s financial watchdog, started investigating Segantii’s Esprit trades. But few employees even knew about it, and it didn’t seem especially disruptive to the wider firm.
Over the years, Sadler’s net worth surged, reaching at least $360mn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, enabling him to send his children to an Oxfordshire private school. He held court on a private boat that stood out among the white vessels in a marina on the south of Hong Kong island because it was, naturally, tangerine-coloured. He bought a racehorse and named it Ten Bob Tony.
In 2019, after a years-long legal battle, Oyston was forced out of the football club. Sadler, watching from afar, knew the club needed a deep-pocketed saviour. He bought Blackpool FC and its stadium for £8.2mn, telling a person involved with the club that he’d purchased it partly because he felt guilty about making so much money and leaving home. (Sadler’s lawyers said he denied having said that.) “I don’t want to sound like a messiah, but there is a point where I am doing it for the greater good, to put something back,” Sadler told the Guardian shortly after making the deal.
To celebrate, Sadler invited a group of Segantii staff and some bankers to Blackpool for the first game of his first season as owner. It was a strong start. The team beat Bristol Rovers 2-0. Fans cheered Sadler’s name and held up scarves that read “Simon Sadler’s Tangerine Army”. He waved to them from the directors’ box, a huge grin on his face. With his grey suit, he wore a tangerine tie. That evening, the contrast between his two worlds was stark. The international finance crowd was almost certainly the most high-net-worth table a seafront bistro in central Blackpool had ever hosted. Some went on to Shenanigans, a lively watering hole with the motto “every night is St Patrick’s night”.
Sadler quickly became a hero at Blackpool FC, where fans would sing, “We’re going up, we’re going up, ’cos we’ve got Simon Sadler.” They were proven right. The club was promoted to the Championship, the second-highest tier of English football, in 2021. “Lads who grow up on Glastonbury Avenue and Bispham Road don’t normally get to go on the hallowed Wembley turf to celebrate their hometown football club getting promoted as fans, let alone as owner,” Sadler later wrote in a post on the club’s website. “I enjoyed every moment.”
Some club insiders found the new owner difficult to work with. They remember Sadler fretting that staff might be drinking the club’s beer — his beer — without paying for it. He wanted to be consulted on minor decisions and, as he did at Segantii, called people “c*nts”. Staff at the football club, receiving messages from Sadler in Hong Kong at all hours, asked themselves when he slept. When one asked a Segantii employee, they replied they wondered the same thing.
In late March 2021, a little-known family office in the US named Archegos Capital Management ran into trouble. It had built a large exposure to US and Chinese stocks, using leverage, and its bets were imploding. Many of the world’s biggest banks were holding the underlying stock and needed to sell fast — a huge unwind of blocks and ADRs. Sadler could hardly have been better placed.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were quick to start dumping their exposure. Segantii did large volumes of trades over a Hong Kong weekend as the chaos unfolded. It would later tell investors it had participated in billions of dollars of Archegos-related trades, an eye-watering amount for a firm with about $5.5bn under management. That made it a key player helping Wall Street manage a huge crisis that shook global finance. One way to make money from such a deal would involve selling that exposure to other investors quickly at smaller discounts, and pocketing the difference. Banks that ditched their Archegos exposure more slowly, such as Credit Suisse, got badly burnt.
Days later, Segantii was cut into one of the biggest block trades in history. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were among the banks arranging the sale of almost $15bn of shares in China’s Tencent. There was no shortage of demand for the stock, but Segantii got a huge $2.2bn portion of it, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. If there were a public record of the biggest-ever hedge fund allocations from secondary block trades, this would probably be at, or near, the top.
It’s not clear what role the seller — which Segantii had helped on a previous block — and the banks each had in determining Segantii’s allocation, and whether the hedge fund was simply offering a better price than other investors. To an external observer, it might have looked like a blueprint for Segantii’s success, one favour following another. Either way, Segantii was at the height of its powers. One former employee said it was an “incredibly profitable” time; another said it was “eye-popping”. (The banks declined to comment.)
Then, in November 2021, Robert Gagliardi, the former Segantii trader nicknamed Gags, boarded a flight from London to Los Angeles. Gags was known for compulsively sharing his views on markets in a fast-flowing Brooklyn patter. Working for Segantii in London, Gags had earned big profits but also clashed with Sadler and eventually left. Now, he was on his way to meet with some of his new colleagues.
As he walked through LAX airport, Gags was stopped by officials from the Department of Justice. They told him they had a search warrant for his phone. It was part of a broad criminal investigation into block trading involving hedge funds and Morgan Stanley. He was one of several people being looked into, at different institutions.
Gags’ trading at Segantii played an important role in the case, and a parallel one by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. He had spoken to a close contact of his, Morgan Stanley banker Pawan Passi, who had access to confidential information about upcoming blocks, the SEC found. While they were on the phone, discussing an impending block, Segantii shorted that company’s shares, it said. Gags had also generated a roughly $760,000 profit by shorting the coat retailer Canada Goose after a colleague of Passi’s, who also had access to confidential information about an upcoming block, asked him about his “store of cold-weather jackets”, the DoJ found. Gags had asked what he “should be focusing on”, it found.
The authorities did not say Gags had known the information was confidential. Gags’ lawyer told me he had “built a distinguished career” and had not “been accused of any wrongdoing by any regulatory authority, nor has he ever faced any regulatory restrictions”. (Passi did not respond to requests for comment.)
Concerns about Segantii had already begun to circulate on Wall Street. Bank of America’s market supervision team in the US issued a directive to cut off Segantii, because of concerns about block trading, in early 2021. Citigroup eventually suspended equity trading with Segantii. In mid-2022, Goldman Sachs adopted a policy of no longer wall-crossing Segantii, meaning it could not share details about blocks it had a mandate to sell. And, in 2023, Morgan Stanley — the subject of the US investigation — stopped doing some business with the hedge fund.
Sadler would ask, in frustration, why Segantii wasn’t getting allocations. Colleagues would have to sheepishly explain it was difficult when some of the banks would no longer do business with them. Segantii reported a loss for 2023, its first annual loss in a decade.
But in January 2024, the justice department and SEC ended their Morgan Stanley probe, announcing a $249mn settlement with the bank and a deferred prosecution agreement with Passi for sharing non-public information. In official reports on the case, the hedge funds involved, including Segantii, were anonymised. No allegations of wrongdoing were made against Sadler’s firm, and the SEC ultimately informed Gags that “based on the information we have as of this date, we do not intend to recommend an enforcement action”, according to court filings.
Any relief at Segantii was brief. In the spring of 2024, Hong Kong’s SFC came calling again. It had been seven years since the Esprit trades, but authorities wanted to talk to Sadler about them in person. Sadler, who had moved to the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, flew back. Once there, he was given a piece of paper. “You, Simon Peter Sadler,” the court summons for the criminal case read, “had information that you knew was inside information” about Esprit and traded anyway. La Rocca, the employee nicknamed Rocket who executed trades, received one too. Segantii as an institution faced the same accusation. (La Rocca declined to comment.)
The Esprit trades had been relatively small. The SFC contends that Segantii made a profit of about HK$65,000 ($8,400) on its short position and avoided a loss of about HK$1.5mn ($193,000) by selling the securities it held, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Yet the SFC has had a far bigger impact on Segantii than the behemoths of US law enforcement.
Soon after, Sadler was in the Eastern Magistrates’ Courts in Sai Wan Ho, on Hong Kong island. He was given a HK$1mn ($129,000) bail, an almost comical sum for a wealthy defendant in such a high-stakes case. He can stay in the UK and travel to Hong Kong for court appearances. The SFC publicly announced the case on May 2, and Segantii disclosed it in a US filing, saying Sadler and his fund intended to defend themselves “vigorously”. But so many investors planned to request their money back, it rapidly became clear Segantii would struggle. In Hong Kong, criminal charges cannot generally be made to go away with a settlement.
In late May, Sadler stood up in front of about 35 colleagues, with more watching online, and read a speech. The hedge fund had decided to shut operations and give investors their money back, one person present remembers him saying. He said he was innocent and walked away.
Life at the football club started getting hard again before the criminal case. The head coach under whom the club had been promoted left in 2022, and the following year the team was relegated. At a forum in June 2024, at which fans were told Sadler could not discuss the court case, he took a confrontational tone. In response to concerns about ticket prices, he said: “Do you wanna pay an extra couple of quid and help make up the difference or what? ’Cos I don’t wanna keep putting in £5mn a year and I can’t find anybody else who does.”
Even so, the mood among fans is far from the lows it reached during the Oyston years. There has been no tangerine-throwing, for instance. But if convicted, English football rules could prevent Sadler from being a director. He has considered selling the club.
Hong Kong’s definition of insider dealing includes trading on information from someone “connected” to a company. Under the territory’s rules, a “substantial shareholder” — with at least a 5 per cent stake in the company — is “connected”. So is a person with access to information through a business relationship with a substantial shareholder. Lone Pine’s Esprit stake was 10 per cent, making it easily a substantial shareholder.
To convict Sadler, prosecutors would have to show that Bank of America had a business relationship with Lone Pine, making it a connected party. They would have to show Segantii was trading on inside information, and that Sadler knew it was. If Bank of America did not wall-cross Segantii before the trades, it’s possible Sadler could argue he did not know for sure that a block trade would happen. A judge’s reaction to such an argument could set an important marker for the whole business of block trading.
The SFC has a strong record on criminal insider-dealing cases. Since 2003, it has brought 16 such cases, and lost only two. These days, Hong Kong does not have the freewheeling reputation it did when Sadler first arrived. Recent Hong Kong cases have shown that even if a banker gives away more information than they should, authorities do not look favourably on hedge funds taking advantage.
It’s December 2024, and Sadler is back in Hong Kong for another pre-trial hearing. Usually, not much happens: his bail is extended, he is given a plea extension. But today is different. Today, the court is told Sadler has pleaded not guilty. So have Segantii and La Rocca. A trial date is set for May 2026. This is the end of the beginning.
Sadler had come a long way, from Blackpool to Hong Kong and back, building a reputation for bold bets and tough talk. As he stood in the dock, his expression was impassive. It was impossible to know what Sadler was thinking. People who knew him told me that Sadler relishes a fight, one noting he has a “raw instinct to smash anything that gets in his way”. But the case that has already cost him much of his business may soon separate him from the club that, for a time, made him a hometown hero. The fight now is for his name and his freedom.
At each hearing, I’d tried to talk to him. Once, Sadler rolled his eyes and refused to take my business card. Another time, he snapped that it was “highly inappropriate” of me to approach him. A glimpse of the Sadler who’d dressed down his traders. But, at later hearings, he was friendlier, asking about my plans for Christmas and telling me that he wasn’t interesting enough to write about. At one point, he let on that he’d found out about my trip to his hometown. Standing a few places ahead of me in the lift queue, Sadler turned back and said: “Didn’t think Blackpool was your kind of place.”
