A former trader at DBS Group Holdings Ltd’s brokerage unit was yesterday convicted by a Singapore court for spoofing the securities market in the city’s first such criminal case.
Dennis Tey Thean Yang, 33, pleaded guilty to eight of the 23 charges he faced including his attempts to artificially move prices through fraudulent securities orders and misusing other people’s trading accounts without consent.
Tey was a broker at DBS Vickers Securities (Singapore) Pte when he committed the offenses over four months in 2012 and 2013. He made a profit of S$30,239 (US$21,310).
Regulators and exchanges are stepping up scrutiny of market misconduct and Tey’s case is the first by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the white-collar crime police since they banded together in 2015.
Singapore Exchange Ltd last month said it would focus on cases that threaten market integrity after punishing traders for false trading.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Kwek Chin Yong called Tey’s scheme sophisticated and not easy to pull off. The prosecution sought a jail term of as long as six months.
“This is one of the hardest fraud cases to be executed by one person,” he said. “We can’t encourage this sort of behavior.”
According to court papers, Tey sought to manipulate prices by placing orders for contracts for differences in the underlying securities of a number of companies and then deleting the fraudulent orders after his trades.
Tey, a Malaysian national, left DBS Vickers in March 2014 and was arrested in May 2015. He is to be sentenced on March 22.
In a statement, DBS said it had zero tolerance for criminal behavior and cooperated with the probe into Tey’s activities.
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