The last weeks have seen a continuation of anti abuse activity and fines from regulators, exchanges and others since our last post here. The activity includes:

A market participant in Denmark was found by the Danish Utility Regulator to have breached REMIT Articles 3 and 4 by failing to publish Urgent Market Messages relating to an outage at an asset and then carrying out trading activity relating to the asset. The activity occurred in November 2019. The notice in Danish can be found here. The market participant failed to publish the information due to process error, and also argued that nevertheless, the information is not considered “inside information” under the criteria of “precise” and “significant”. The regulator disagrees with this assessment and refer to the REMIT Guidance updated by ACER last year (see here). As a result the market participant has received a reprimand.

Three banks were fined a total of 371 million Euros, as reported here on the Reuters site. The banks were fined for engaging in anti competitive behaviour in the bond markets, by inappropriately sharing information relating to prices and volumes in the run up to auctions.

A trader was fined £100,000 and suspended for two years for pre arranged trades on ICE Futures Europe in SOFR Index Futures here. This fine of £44,500 issued by Ice Futures Europe relates to a position limits breach. Fines issued by CME include one for $25,000 for a position limits breach on NYMEX in crude oil futures here and another for $40,000 here.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority published the 67th edition of the MarketWatch newsletter here. While the newsletter focuses on Equity manipulation, it also covers algorithms and a case where potential spoofing was identified leading to the responsible firm introducing further training and appropriate procedures.

Ofgem, Great Britain’s National Regulatory Authority, has opened a consultation on their Enforcement Guidelines and Sectoral Penalty Statement which can be found here.