Financial Regulatory Forum

By Julie DiMauro

BOSTON/NEW YORK, May 9 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Financial services firms may face more negligence cases brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, reflecting a greater willingness by the commission to base charges on negligence findings, industry professionals were told at a Thomson Reuters forum.

“What we are seeing is a willingness to actively go out and charge negligence,” Ian Roffman, a partner at Nutter, McClennen & Fish LLP, told compliance officers and others in a panel discussion on SEC enforcement hosted by the Thomson Reuters Governance, Compliance and Risk division.  (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

LONDON/NEW YORK, Nov. 22 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – When the young UBS trader Kweku Adoboli turned himself in after allegedly having lost $2.3 billion on the Swiss bank’s delta one desk, many asked how such a huge loss could have happened without anyone knowing. The short answer was, in part, that Adoboli’s back-office experience gave him inside knowledge which permitted him to game UBS’ control systems and hide the fraud. The same excuse was trotted out to explain Jérôme Kerviel’s $6.8 billion loss at Société Générale in 2008, but it must surely take more than a stint in the bank office to fool banks’ risk controls systems.

Giorgio Questa, visiting professor in the faculty of finance at Cass Business School in London, said: “Banks have not understood that they will have accidents if they don’t come to terms with risk controls. It’s a question of incompetence. It’s completely clear [in the UBS case] that people weren’t doing their jobs.” (more…)