A dentist and his work experience stockbroker son were facing jail today for a £110,000 insider trading scam.

Matthew Uberoi was on a placement scheme with brokers Hoare Govett while using coded messages about Chinese food to feed his father Neel secret takeovers tips.

The information was then used to make a string of lucrative but forbidden stock deals, the first of which racked up a “very sweet” profit of up to £101,000.

As the days and weeks passed, Neel Uberoi’s 24-year-old son, then a business administration undergraduate, gave him two more “market sensitive” tips, netting just under £9,000.

John Kelsey-Fry, QC, prosecuting, told London’s Southwark Crown Court: “So you have a picture of Mr Uberoi senior purchasing shares in three separate companies in which he had no previous dealings at all... just before favourable announcements were made to the market, and then immediately selling those shares.

“On each of these occasions his son was working on the very Hoare Govett team advising over the transactions that were about to be announced.”

But in evidence Matthew Uberoi, from Fulham, south-west London, claimed he could not possibly have passed inside information to his father because he never had it in the first place.

He also insisted while he remembered attending a “general compliance talk - the same one as the security guards and secretaries - it all went over my head”.

Uberoi added: “I had a rough understanding but it didn’t seem relevant to me. It was never drilled down to me that Hoare Govett is where people hold inside information.”

In fact the training was so limited he “learnt more from films like Wall Street”.

“But the biscuits were very good,” he added.

His 62-year-old father, of Woodlands Firs Road, Kenley, Surrey, admitted being “completely addicted” to following the stock market - “It’s a bit like Facebook” - but insisted he owed all his share buying success to honest “internet research”.

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