Macquarie Bank hit with record $4.995 million fine after failing to act over energy market breaches

A record $4.995 million fine was imposed on Macquarie Bank for their failure to halt suspicious orders on the electricity futures market, according to 9 NEWS
Australia’s fifth-largest bank was hit with the biggest fine that ASIC’s Market Disciplinary Panel (MDP) has ever assessed.
According to the corporate regulator, Macquarie violated market integrity rules by allowing three clients to place suspicious orders on fifty different occasions between January and September 2022.Each order was placed within the final minute of market close, meaning the clients with interest in those contracts manipulated the daily settlement price in a favourable direction.
According to ASIC, Macquarie “should have suspected” that 50 of the orders were placed with the goal of giving the market a false or misleading impression.
The MDP levied the record-breaking fine, according to ASIC Chair Joe Longo, in response to Macquarie’s “serious, prolonged and potentially systematic failure” to identify the market manipulation.