The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a former Banco Santander executive and a former Spanish judge with insider trading over a proposed takeover of Potash Corp of Saskatchewan Inc on which the Spanish bank had given investment banking advice. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New York, the SEC is seeking to recover nearly $1 million of alleged illegal profit by Cedric Cañas Maillard, a former adviser to Banco Santander's chief executive, and Julio Marín Ugedo, the former judge. According to the SEC, Cañas, 40, had learned on Aug. 5, 2010, that Santander was helping Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton Ltd prepare a bid for Potash, a fertilizer company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The SEC said that Cañas, a Harvard Business School graduate, then tipped the acquisition to Marín, 42, a close friend with whom he had grown up and still talked to by phone, text message or email dozens of times a month. According to the SEC, Cañas
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