A Hearing Panel in Vancouver between Union Securities Ltd. and Market Regulation Services Inc. approved a settlement on Tuesday in which Union agreed to pay RS a sum of $150,000 for its failure to correct trade supervision and audit trail deficiencies persisting at Union for the past three years. The firm also agreed to implement specific measures to improve its trade supervision and compliance systems.

Union agreed that it failed to update its trade supervision and compliance policies and procedures, including adequate and accurate testing to address certain material trading risks, since 2003. Union also agreed that it failed to consistently enter and record accurate and complete order information on the marketplaces RS regulates during that time. This failure resulted in order and trade information available to RS for regulatory purposes being unreliable.

RS co-ordinated its settlement with other settlements concluded yesterday by Union with each of the Investment Dealers Association of Canada and the British Columbia Securities Commission. In these settlements, each regulator addressed compliance and supervisory deficiencies relevant to each regulator’s mandate: “This is an excellent example of how Canada’s securities SRO system is supposed to work,” said Gerry Halischuk, vice president, market regulation, western region, at RS. “By co-operating with each other, we protect Canada’s capital markets by applying our respective specialized expertise while simultaneously minimizing regulatory costs to the industry. This settlement advances RS’s obligation to protect the integrity of Canada’s equity trading markets while not imposing unfair regulatory costs on Union.”