LONDON — A judge ordered on Wednesday that Navinder Singh Sarao be sent to the United States to face criminal charges accusing him of playing a major role in causing the May 2010 "flash crash" in the United States stock market.
Mr. Sarao will not be sent back to the United States immediately, however.
The judge's decision will be forwarded to the secretary of state of Britain, who will have two months to review it and make the order official.
Mr. Sarao's lawyers said they would appeal the decision following the secretary of state's review. He remains free on bail during the review.
Mr. Sarao, 36, was arrested in April of last year and has fought extradition to the United States since his arrest.
A British futures trader, Mr. Sarao is facing 22 criminal charges, including wire fraud and commodities manipulation. If convicted on all charges, he could face a prison sentence of more than 300 years.
Mr. Sarao is accused by United States authorities of helping to contribute to the turmoil in the markets on May 6, 2010, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 600 points in a matter of minutes.
Although the markets recovered their losses quickly, the event rattled investors and confounded authorities, who charged Mr. Sarao five years later with the help of an informant.
Prosecutors in the United States have accused Mr. Sarao of entering and withdrawing thousands of orders worth tens of millions of dollars each on hundreds of trading days, in an attempt to push down the price of futures contracts tied to the value of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, a practice known as spoofing.
Mr. Sarao's lawyers have argued for in part that the flash crash was caused by other factors and market participants, rather than Mr. Sarao, who lives with his parents in Hounslow, a middle-class neighborhood near Heathrow Airport.
"I reject the challenges by the defense and find the request a valid one," District Judge Quentin Purdy said in his written decision on Wednesday.
Yet the judge also seemed to share the view that Mr. Sarao's role in the flash crash, if he had one, was minor.
The causes of the flash crash "were not a single action and cannot on any view be laid wholly or mostly at Navinder Sarao's door, although he was acting on the day," the judge said in his written order. "In any event, this is also a single trading day in over 400 relied upon by prosecutors."
The defense also argued that the act of spoofing, which Mr. Sarao is accused of committing, is illegal in the United States, but is not a crime in Britain.
Prosecutors have said he made about $ 40 million through his trading from 2010 to 2014, according to the criminal complaint.
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