The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) Tuesday released its first ever enforcement report, detailing the regulator’s enforcement activities for 2014.
The report provides a high-level overview of the BCSC’s efforts to deter misconduct, protect investors, and ensure that B.C.’s capital markets function fairly and efficiently.
“A key part of our mandate involves ensuring that B.C.’s capital markets are fair and deserving of public confidence,” said Paul Bourque, executive director of the BCSC, in a release. “This report underscores the important work undertaken by our Enforcement division to pursue bad actors and protect the reputation of our markets.”
The report outlines the legal powers available to the BCSC’s Enforcement division under the Securities Act to investigate and prosecute securities-related misconduct. It also describes the BCSC’s unique enforcement process, designed to move cases swiftly from the investigation stage to litigation.
The division handled 173 new cases in 2014 for violations including: unregistered activity; illegal sales of securities; fraud, registrant misconduct; director and officer misconduct; insider trading; market manipulation and disclosure violations.
In total, the division prosecuted nine fraud cases in 2014.
“We have a unique approach to enforcement at the BCSC, and this report highlights that,” said Teresa Mitchell-Banks, director of Enforcement for the BCSC. “We prosecute every case where it is in the public interest to do so, and we make enforcement a function of all of the work we do, from compliance to investor education.”
The report includes summaries of 22 administrative cases and three criminal cases that resulted in findings from a BCSC hearing panel or a criminal court in 2014.