Compliance breaches cost National Bank half a million dollars

The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) imposed an administrative penalty of $500,000 on National Bank Financial for failures to follow up.

According to the agreement submitted to the Financial Markets Administrative Tribunal (TMF) by the AMF, the Financière Banque Nationale (FBN) did not send documents “within the prescribed period” to 13,578 customers for the acquisition of a total of 24,168 principal unprotected notes issued by National Bank of Canada, between June 12, 2018 and November 11, 2019.

National Bank Financial has since sent the prospectuses, accompanied by a notice, to all of its customers who should have received them, the AMF said in a press release on Tuesday.

Accordingly, the institution will have to pay an administrative penalty of $500,000 for breaches of sections 29 of the Securities Act and 11.1 of Regulation 31-103 respecting Registration Requirements, Exemptions and Ongoing Registrant Obligations.

As part of this agreement, “FBN has admitted all of the alleged facts and breaches. The administrative penalty imposed on FBN takes into account in particular its reporting of the situation to the AMF, its cooperation and the efforts it made to correct the shortcomings that led to the breaches noted and to remedy the situation with its customers”, can we also read.