Neither UBS nor Coca-Cola Femsa faces accusations of wrongdoing.

[ by Melanie Gretchen and Howard Haykin ]

UBS is reported to be the executing broker in the $76 million trade of Coca-Cola Femsa SAB shares on 1/17/13 - that is suspected to have been based on insider information.  The trade went off just hours before the bottler announced its biggest acquisition in 16 months.  Mexican securities regulators are investigating the trade, whose size was equivalent to more than 6 times the stock’s average daily trading volume over the past year.

According to Mexico’s National Banking and Securities Commission, the trade went off at 8:30 a.m.  After the markets were closed, at around 9 p.m., Coca-Cola Femsa announced it agreed to buy the Mexican drink maker Grupo Yoli SA in a deal valued at 8.81 billion pesos (nearly $700 million).  The following day, the bottler maker's shares advanced 1.2%.

To date, neither UBS nor Coca-Cola Femsa is facing any accusations of wrongdoing   Nevertheless, the trade raised red flags.  Since then, Luis Tellez, CEO of the Mexican stock exchange, Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, said that the bourse’s market surveillance unit identified the transaction as one that exceeded “certain parameters” warranting a referral to the commission.

For further details, go to [Bloomberg, 2/21/13].