The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced on Tuesday that a U.S. district court judge has ordered disbarred Canadian lawyer John Briner and his former firm, Vancouver-based MetroWest Law Corp., to pay US$280,000 for their role in a so-called “money pass” scheme. The court also imposed permanent registration, trading and solicitation bans against them.
The CFTC says that the court’s order finds that Briner provided the login information for a trading account he had opened in the name of his law firm to co-defendant Matthew Marcus and allowed Marcus to enter trades for the MetroWest account. The account was then used to carry out a scheme that moved US$390,000 from the MetroWest trading account to an account Marcus opened in the name of his company, Tech Power Inc., through a series of 1,248 pre-arranged, non-competitive trades using single stock futures. In July, the court also sanctioned Marcus and Tech Power.
U.S. securities regulators had previously sanctioned Briner in connection with an alleged micro-cap trading scheme.