On 21 January 2015, the United States Securities Exchange Commission announced sanctions against credit rating firm, Standard & Poor’s Rating Services (S&P), which include payments in the total sum of US$58 million and an undertaking by S&P to take a one-year timeout from rating conduit fusion commercial mortgage-backed securities. S&P further agreed to pay an additional US$19 million to settle parallel cases announced by the New York and Massachusetts Attorney General’s offices.
Separately in Hong Kong, the Securities and Futures Commission recently commenced enforcement actions respectively against, (i) another credit rating firm, Moody’s Investors Service Hong Kong Limited, and (ii) Andrew Left of Citron Research, which is a US-based publisher of research reports on listed companies.
This bulletin, from our teams in New York and Hong Kong, provides a brief summary of these actions by the regulators in the US and Hong Kong.
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