Australia’s regulator fined Openmarkets Australia A$4.5 million ($3 million) after one of the country’s largest retail brokers was found to have breached market integrity rules.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission also banned the firm’s former acting head of trading Virginia Owczarek from providing any financial service for three years, according to a statement Thursday.
Openmarkets had a “very poor” history of compliance failures, ASIC said. It said the Sydney-based firm had breached “numerous” market integrity rules for several years and had agreed to appoint an independent expert to evaluate its trade surveillance and compliance systems.
ASIC started investigating the firm after routine surveillance found that a client of the broker had placed simultaneous bid and ask orders in the same security and at the same price on 2,011 occasions. The practice, commonly known as spoofing, could have created an artificial trading price or a false or misleading appearance of active trading, the regulator said.
ASIC noted that the same customer was responsible for suspicious trading resulting in an infringement notice in 2017.
Openmarkets has “significantly overhauled its business” under a new leadership team since the breaches were identified, the firm said in a statement on its website. The firm said they occurred between 2018 and 2021.
Read More: Spoofing Is a Silly Name for Serious Market Rigging: QuickTake
ASIC’s findings on Owczarek include that she accepted a A$2,000 payment from a client for stock tips and used personal devices for client communications, including trading instructions.
