Forty-seven defendants will be charged today following an 18- month undercover investigation into the foreign exchange trading market, U.S. Attorney James Comey said in a statement. He will have a press conference at 11 a.m. in New York. The defendants will be formally charged afterwards.

The probe, which Comey dubbed ``Operation Wooden Nickel,'' may be the widest investigation into the unregulated foreign exchange market, which sets the value of world currencies. The charges against traders at more than a dozen firms, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., will include conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and securities fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

``The arrests were made midafternoon New York time,'' ICAP spokesman Mike Sheard said in London. The brokers arrested were from the Swiss franc spot trading desk at ICAP's Harlow unit, ICAP said in a statement on the Regulatory News Service. The employees arrested ``had no ability to trade as principal on behalf of ICAP,'' the statement said.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against United Currency Group Inc. and its chief executive Adam Swickle for conducting a fraudulent offering of the company's securities from May 2001 through December 2002, the agency said today in a release. The complaint is part of Operation Wooden Nickel, Mark Schonfeld, an associate SEC regional director, said.

Swickle

Swickle, 36, the founder of UCG, employed sales representatives to trade foreign currency for its clients, the SEC said. Swickle raised $774,000 through the fraudulent offering, the agency said.

Three ICAP brokers were arrested at their Jersey City, New Jersey, office, Sheard said. One UBS employee was arrested, said Rudolf Buergin, a UBS spokesman in Zurich. A Collins Stewart Tullett employee in New York was arrested, said Emma Kane, a spokeswoman for the company in London.

ICAP

The brokers arrested were from the Swiss franc spot-trading desk at ICAP's Harlow unit, ICAP said in a statement on the Regulatory News Service. The employees arrested ``had no ability to trade as principal on behalf of ICAP,'' the statement said.

In the alleged fraud, employees of UBS and J.P. Morgan engineered trades in which their firms lost money and their customers made money, the Journal said. The banks' employees then secretly arranged to share in the customers' profits on the trades, the unidentified people cited by the Journal said.

``We are conducting our own investigation to determine how this happened,'' UBS's Buergin said. ``We are cooperating with the authorities in the U.S.'' UBS, Europe's largest bank, is the biggest trader in the $1.2 trillion a day global currency market, according to Euromoney magazine's annual rankings.

Adam Castellani, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan, declined to comment. J.P. Morgan is No. 4 in the currency market. London- based ICAP acts as a go-between for investment banks that trade bonds, currencies and derivatives, or contracts pegged to other assets. The New Jersey office is the firm's second largest, with almost 500 brokers, according to ICAP's Web site.

Individual Crimes

``My understanding is that the FBI have said it relates entirely to the individual and not to the company,'' said Collins Stewart's Kane in an interview.

Shares in ICAP fell as much as 100 pence, or 7 percent, to 1,327 pence. They traded at 1,365 pence at 12:32 p.m. in London. Shares of London-based broker Collins Stewart declined 4.75 pence, or 1.2 percent, to 379.25.

UBS has more than tripled its share of the global currency market since 2001 to 11.5 percent. J.P. Morgan, the second- largest U.S. bank, has a 6.5 percent share, according to Euromoney.

Last month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged A.S. Templeton and two of its officers with stealing about $6 million from more than 300 of the currency-trading firm's clients.

The move was part of the commission's efforts to crack down on fraud in currency-futures trading. Since December 2000, the commission has filed more than 40 cases involving $177 million taken from at least 3,500 investors.