Market Abuse - FSA ups the ante

In March 2010, Hector Sants, the chief executive of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), said market abuse in the UK’s financial services sector was at an "unacceptably high level" and that more needed to be done to tackle insider dealing and other manipulation.

In the remainder of that year, the FSA issued 17 enforcement notices with fines totalling £8.2m. This was in contrast to the 7 enforcement notices and fines totalling less than £0.5m for 2009.

This highlights the FSA’s determination in respect of this issue which organisations need to be aware of. It is likely that the successor entity to the FSA will continue to take a hard line.

To assist your organisation, PwC can:

• Advise on the regulatory regime and regulator “hot topics” and advise on best practice;
• Identify key market abuse risks and behaviours for a client’s business; Assist in drafting policies and procedures tailored to specific risk profiles;
• Perform detailed investigations (both internal and under s.166); Perform gap analysis and rigorous testing of controls;
• Provide control recommendations to meet the expectations of the Regulator; provide investigative support, including the use of sophisticated tools to recover, collate and analyse large complex data;
• Build incident response plan and develop “heat map” of controls linked to risk assessment.

Download our Market Abuse brochure