Three former employees were also penalised and banned from working in financial services
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has imposed a fine of £10 million on Banque Havilland over what it deemed as the bank’s manipulative trading strategies.
The regulator also fined three of the bank’s former employees at its London branch: branch chief executive Edmund Rowland, £352,000; branch senior manager David Weller, £54,000; and branch employee Vladimir Bolelyy, £14,200. They were also banned from working in financial services.
According to the FCA, between September and November 2017, Banque Havilland “acted without integrity by creating and disseminating a document which contained manipulative trading strategies aimed at creating a false or misleading impression as to the market in, or the price of, Qatari bonds.”
The regulator added that the objective was to devalue the Qatari riyal and break its peg to the US dollar, thereby harming the economy of Qatar. Banque Havilland intended to present the document to representatives of countries it considered might have reasons to want to put economic pressure on Qatar, including the United Arab Emirates, as a way of marketing its services.
The FCA has not found that the strategy in the document was implemented. However, such manipulative trading could have been a criminal offence, had it taken place in the UK.
It was found that Rowland tasked Bolelyy to draft the document and Weller made a significant contribution to the content. Later, Rowland and Bolelyy disseminated the document, and provided a copy to a representative of an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.
Banque Havilland, Edmund Rowland and Vladimir Bolelyy have referred their Decision Notices to the Upper Tribunal where they will each present their case.https://t.co/YVdP59p6lx
— Financial Conduct Authority (@TheFCA) May 5, 2023
“Banque Havilland’s conduct actively encouraged the commission of financial crime, providing ideas for manipulative trading to someone it saw as having the political motivation to be potentially interested in such ideas,” Therese Chambers, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the Financial Conduct Authority, said. “It barely needs stating, but such conduct is completely unacceptable.
“The misconduct of Rowland and Boleyy was deliberate. Weller claimed to have believed that the other two were joking around, but as a senior manager, he behaved recklessly. There was an obvious risk of impropriety, and he willingly took that risk without seeking any assurances that things would go no further.”
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