Citigroup Global Markets today agreed to pay a $15 million penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that it failed to enforce policies and procedures to prevent and detect securities transactions that could involve the misuse of material, nonpublic information.
Federal securities laws require firms to take reasonable steps to prevent the misuse of material nonpublic information. According to the SEC, Citigroup did not review thousands of trades executed by several of its trading desks from 2002 to 2012. Personnel used electronically generated reports to review trades on a daily basis, but technological errors caused the reports to omit several sources of information about thousands of relevant trades, the SEC said.
