The husband of an ex-Linklaters associate who used confidential information from an M&A deal the firm was working on to make more than $100,000 (£75,600) on the stock market, has pleaded guilty to insider trading.

Reuters reports that Fei Yan, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pleaded guilty yesterday (30 October) in Boston and is scheduled to be sentenced on 2 March.

Yan was arrested in July and accused of using inside information about Linklaters client Sibanye Gold's acquisition of Stillwater Mining for $2.2bn (£1.7bn) in 2016 to buy stock options in Stillwater. He then offloaded his stock options on the day the deal was announced, for a profit of more than $100,000.

The US Government also said that he searched the internet for tips on how to avoid prosecution for insider trading, accessing an article titled 'Want to Commit Insider Trading? Here's How Not To Do It'.

Yan's wife, Linklaters New York corporate associate Menglu Wang, worked on the deal for the firm's South African client Sibanye. She was suspended by Linklaters following her husband's arrest in July. A spokesperson for Linklaters confirmed that she has since left the firm. She has not faced any charges.

Wang earned an undergraduate degree from Tufts University and graduated in 2015 from Harvard Law School. She interned at the World Bank Group in the summer of 2013, working on anti-corruption legal investigations, according to her bio on LinkedIn. She was a Linklaters summer associate in 2014, before joining the firm as an associate in September 2015.

Linklaters declined to comment.