In the final days of the financial year, Money Management reviews the number of charges made against current and former financial advisers by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
The regulator had been busy issuing statements, especially in the past few weeks regarding misconduct by financial advisers in the six months of 2021/22.
Earlier this week, an Adelaide financial adviser, Tai Thanh Nguyen, who had been permanently banned by ASIC in 2019, was charged with seven counts of allegedly falsifying his company books.
A former Queensland adviser, Lawrence Toledo, was convicted and fined $1,500 in May after pleading guilty to three charges of breaching an ASIC banning order. He had been banned in 2017 for seven years after ASIC found he had failed to act in the best interests of his clients when advising them to establish a self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) to purchase properties.
In May, a former financial adviser in Tasmania, Ashley Grant Howard, was charged with 17 offences for falsifying transfer forms to arrange for shares to be transferred between parties without the knowledge and approval of shareholders.
Another former adviser from Pymble, NSW, Ezzat-Daniel Nesseim, was sentenced to a three-year intensive correctional order for engaging in dishonest conduct and providing falsified documents to ASIC. He also knowingly made use of fabricated evidence including doctored emails and purported witness statements in a hearing with ASIC.
A Melbourne-based adviser, Mark Christopher Babbage, was banned in April from providing financial services or engaging in credit activities for 10 years as ASIC felt he lacked the honesty and integrity to participate in financial services or credit industries.
At the start of the year, ASIC ordered RI Advice to pay $6 million for failing to take steps to ensure its authorised representative and former adviser, John Doyle, provided appropriate financial advice and acted in his clients’ best interests.
The regulator had previously stated there were four civil financial advice misconduct and two administrative cases concluded between 1 July and 31 December, 2021.
