PrefBlog

Marc McQuillen, who was David Berry’s assistant, has settled with RS regarding the allegations made against him. While I cannot say I have examined every jot and tittle of the document, it appears that the RS allegations were a carbon copy of the Scotia Settlement and allegations against Berry.

The sanction imposed was a fine of $25,000.

There is a little more information in the settlement agreement that I consider particularly interesting:

In addition, solely for the purpose of this Settlement, McQuillen relies upon the following facts:

• (a) Berry’s supervisor during the period 1999 to October 2002 has stated that he was aware of certain aspects of the Trading (as described in paragraph 22 of the Statement of Allegations), as follows, but he did not appreciate that it resulted in clients receiving secondary market shares in the new issue:
  • (i) Berry and/or McQuillen took orders from clients for shares in a new issue during the selling period and filled these orders through sales from the 08 account when the new issue began trading on the TSX.
  • (ii) In some instances, the 08 account would receive an allocation of new issue shares but ultimately incur a short position in the shares of the new issue through sales with clients.

  (iii) In other cases, a swap transaction with a client’s existing position was involved.

• (b) The supervisor has stated that he was not aware of instances in which the 08 account sold short shares in the new issue to clients without taking an allocation in the new issue.

As far as I can make out, the supervisor has not been named or been the subject of disciplinary hearings. These are murky waters … I suspect that the significance of the above extract will emerge as the legal struggle continues. We already know that one element of Berry’s lawsuit for wrongful dismissal is that he was not trained or supervised properly (or words to that effect) and hence cannot be nailed for doing his job in the best way he knew how.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.