Sonray director pleads guilty, faces sentencing
The sole director of collapsed specialist contracts for difference (CFD) broker Sonray Capital Markets, Russell Andrew Johnson, is facing sentencing in the Victorian Supreme Court after pleading guilty to seven charges brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
The regulator announced the outcome late yesterday saying Johnson, of the Melbourne suburb of Toorak, had pleaded guilty to three charges of false accounting, one charge of submitting a false document to ASIC, two charges of theft to the value of $742,641 and one charge of obtaining a financial advantage by deception.
ASIC said the charges related to the use of various Sonray client’s trading accounts to create numerous unfunded deposits for which no physical cash was involved.
It said this was done to either obtain funds for use by himself or Sonray, or to hedge the trading book against margin calls, and that the effect of withdrawing funds from client accounts from unfunded deposit entries was an actual deficiency in the segregated client account funds.
ASIC said alleged that, additionally, Johnson, in a solvency report required by ASIC, made a false statement about equity injections of $5.2 million into the company.
Johnson was granted bail and will appear at the Supreme Court on 11 November for a sentence hearing, on conditions that he inform the court of any change to his residential address, surrender his passport and not attend any international port of departure and not contact any prosecution witness
Sonray was placed into liquidation in October, 2010, with its former chief executive, Scott Murray being sentenced to five years’ jail in October 2011.
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