What the charge signals
On 8 July 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) charged a City solicitor, Richard Bloomfield, with five counts of insider dealing over trades in a company whose takeover he was advising on. He has entered no plea, and nothing is proven. What the charge does put back in front of every compliance team is a point they know in principle but do not always build for: the people advising a deal sit inside the information perimeter, and the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) treats them as such.
Bloomfield, 38, appeared before Westminster Magistrates' Court and gave no indication of plea. According to the FCA, he worked as a solicitor on the acquisition of Seraphine Group PLC and used inside information obtained through that role to deal in the company's shares on five occasions between 28 March 2022 and 10 January 2023. He was released on unconditional bail, and his case has been sent to Southwark Crown Court, where he is expected to next appear on 5 August 2026. Insider dealing is a criminal offence under section 52 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993, and it carries a custodial sentence.
A small deal with a wide perimeter
Seraphine was a maternity and nursing-wear brand, once listed at a valuation of around £150m. Behind the charge sits a modest transaction: on 20 January 2023, Mayfair Equity Partners agreed to buy the remaining 57% stake in the company for £8.7m, and the offer became unconditional on 8 March. Small deals still move markets when the news breaks, which is the whole reason the information around them is price-sensitive and legally protected in the weeks before it does.
Who is in the frame, and who is not
Goodwin, the US firm named by Legal Futures as Bloomfield's former employer, advised Mayfair Equity Partners on that deal. It is worth being precise about who is in the frame and who is not. The FCA has stressed that it is investigating neither the law firm nor Seraphine Group, and Goodwin has said there are no allegations of wrongdoing against the firm and that it has cooperated fully. A charge against an individual is not a charge against the practice he worked in.
Advisers are insiders under MAR
MAR draws its insider net wider than people outside compliance often assume. Its obligations fall on issuers and, in the same breath, on anyone acting on their behalf: the lawyers, bankers, accountants and PR advisers who touch a live transaction. Every one of them who receives inside information is an insider for MAR's purposes, must appear on an insider list, and must acknowledge in writing the duties and the sanctions that come with the information. An adviser is not a bystander to the issuer's obligations. On a deal, the adviser is often where the information lives first.
So where should an adviser actually sit? Under Article 18 of UK MAR the duty runs in two directions at once. An issuer keeps an insider list covering everyone it has brought inside its perimeter, advisory firms and their named individuals included, and each firm acting on the issuer's behalf keeps its own list covering its own people with access. A solicitor working on a takeover should therefore be traceable twice over: recorded by the issuer as an external party inside the deal, and recorded by his own firm on the list it is separately obliged to maintain. Either route puts the same discipline on the adviser, namely a written acknowledgement and a dated entry that says precisely when access began.
A practical lesson for advisory firms
That two-way duty is why the record of who knew what, and when, matters as much on the adviser side as at the issuer. A precise insider list is the document that lets a firm show a regulator exactly which of its people held inside information on a given deal and from which date, and it is the same document that lets the firm draw a clean line around an individual if one goes off on his own. Where access is logged loosely, batched at the end of a week, or reconstructed after the fact from memory and email, that line is far harder to draw. Good record-keeping does not stop a person from misusing information, but it does determine how quickly and how convincingly everyone else can account for their own conduct.
A live case is not the place to draw conclusions the court has not reached, so this stays a narrow and practical point. Advisory firms that treat insider lists as a box the issuer ticks, rather than an obligation they carry in their own right, are the ones most exposed when a name on a deal team becomes a name in a press release. Capturing access at the moment it changes, holding written acknowledgements, and keeping an audit trail that will stand up months later is exactly the manual grind that InsiderList is built to take off a compliance team's desk. If it has been a while since you checked how your firm records adviser access, this is a good week to do it.
Sources: FCA press release, 8 July 2026; Legal Futures, 9 July 2026. Further reading on InsiderList: what an insider list should contain, obtaining insider acknowledgements, and an overview of the regulation.
