(Reuters) -Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission said on Tuesday it has imposed a five-year ban on former Citigroup head of pan-Asia equities, Richard Charles Heyes, after he was found liable for regulatory breaches during his tenure more than five years ago.
The SFC in 2022 had imposed sanctions against Citigroup Global Markets Asia (CGMAL) for sending misleading messages to clients about trades, weak oversight, and misrepresenting the nature of trades.
CGMAL was also fined HK$348.3 million ($44.76 million) for the breaches, which occurred between 2008 and 2018.
The regulator held Heyes responsible for those breaches and is prohibiting him from re-entering the financial industry till September 2030, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
“By exerting significant pressure on the trading desks to grow CGMAL’s market share while failing to be vigilant for telltale signs that his subordinates were achieving this by dishonest means, Heyes neglected and failed to properly discharge his managerial responsibility,” said Christopher Wilson, the SFC’s executive director of enforcement.
Furthermore, the SFC found that Heyes ought to have learnt from emails addressed or forwarded to him by his subordinates that traders were misrepresenting facilitation trades as agency trades to clients in order to gain additional market share, it said.
As a result, the failure “enabled a culture of chasing revenue at the expense of client interests and basic standards of honesty to take root within CGMAL,” Wilson said.
Citigroup declined to comment on the news, but said it has “implemented significant remedial measures to strengthen our compliance and internal controls to address this legacy issue from 2019,” in an emailed response to Reuters.
($1 = 7.7813 Hong Kong dollars)
(Reporting by Shivangi Lahiri in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
