The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has permanently banned former authorised representative, Roderick Halligan, from providing financial services or having any involvement in a financial services business for contravening financial services laws and failure to his legal obligations.
The corporate watchdog found that Halligan, who was an authorised representative of Australian financial services licensee BR Securities Australia Pty Ltd between June 2015 and October 2020, transferred shares in excess of $550,000 from his clients’ accounts into the trading account of Santorini Sun Pty Ltd, a business in which he held an interest, without client authorisation.
Additionally, Halligan sold these shares to the benefit of Santorini Sun and himself.
ASIC also found that Halligan engaged in conduct designed to cause his clients to believe that they still had the shares he had transferred without authorisation.
Following this, ASIC found that Halligan had failed in his legal obligations not to mislead or deceive and was likely to continue to contravene financial services laws.
Halligan had the right to appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) for a review of ASIC’s decision.
Comments
A story such as this stuns me, not so much as that there are criminal elements in our industry as in all industries, but that the "banning" of him should be the least of the story and he should be incarcerated for many years. This is not what the "compliance" changes are targeting, in so much as the actions identified above have ALWAYS been a crime, and ALWAYS requiring of punishment. That's why I continue to believe that so much of the recent change to our industry is overkill... the genuine bad apples such as Roderick Halligan were already legislated against and their actions never condoned...
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