City AM has agreed to pay a substantial sum in damages and legal costs to a City trader who it wrongly claimed had lost his job following a mistake in his unit that wiped billions off share values.
In fact, a statement read in the High Court on Tuesday said, Citigroup’s Ali Omari was on holiday at the time of the inputting error, it was not in his trading unit, and he had not been sacked but had been headhunted for a position elsewhere.
Omari’s solicitor told the High Court the article, published in May and headlined “Citi top dog loses job after fat fingered trade wiped billions off European companies”, had caused him “considerable and inevitable distress” and “went to the core” of his “reputation built up over many years”.
City AM took down the article within 16 hours and its solicitor repeated its “apology and its regret that the statement was ever made”.
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