EADS manager held for second day in French custody

PARIS (AFP) - The head of a German EADS subsidiary, former top Airbus executive Andreas Sperl, was held in French custody for a second day Thursday for questioning over alleged insider trading at the aerospace group, judicial sources said.

The 61-year-old Sperl is one of 17 people suspected by French stock market investigators of using inside knowledge about production delays at Airbus, the main subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence Space Company (EADS), to make massive gains on share sales.

He was taken into custody for questioning by French financial investigators on Wednesday morning and can be held for a maximum of 48 hours.

A former Airbus chief financial officer who now heads an EADS plant in the eastern German city of Dresden, Sperl is the first serving senior manager at the group to be questioned in the probe, in which three former EADS bosses have so far been charged.

According to a report by France's financial market regulator AMF, Sperl sold 58,000 EADS shares in November 2005 and March 2006, earning 816,000 euros (1.28 million dollars), before Airbus revealed delays with its A380 superjumbo.

The announcement in June 2006 of a six-month delivery delay on the new A380, the world's largest airliner, threw EADS and its 100-percent-owned Airbus aircraft unit into crisis and caused the EADS share price to plunge.

The former boss of Airbus, German Gustav Humbert, and two French former EADS executives, Noel Forgeard and Jean-Paul Gut, have already been charged with insider trading in relation to share sales during the same period.