I must admit I am having a crisis of confidence in our equity regulatory systems.
After writing my letter of complaint to ASIC (and copying in the RBA and the secretary to the treasury) about the conflict of interest between the ASX and ISX and stating that "this type of very serious conflict of interest creates real distrust in our regulatory system at the very centre of our financial, trading and economic systems in Australia and a new process for the management of these entities must be put in place. All current and future Australian FinTech’s should be concerned. ASIC is the appropriate body to take over these activities."
I received what I thought was a good letter from the treasury stating that they had made ASIC aware of my complaint and were making sure that they were addressing it. Feeling good so far...
Then I got a letter from ASIC that said:
(Bold my emphasis)Thank you for your correspondencedated 5 December 2019. We confirm that you are concerned about ASX Limited’scontinuing suspension of iSignThis Limited securities from official quotation,including allegations of a conflict of interest.
ASIC values the information we receive from the public, andreports of misconduct such as yours assist us in working to build confidence inthe integrity of the capital markets.
ASIC conducts an assessment of every report of misconduct we receive. The issues youhave raised will receive careful consideration, and we have recorded them onour internal intelligence database.
... all good so far, but then...
In selecting matters for regulatory action, we consider arange of factors, including whetherthe misconduct report suggests any breaches of the law we administer, whetherwe have sufficient grounds to suspect that a breach has occurred, and whetherregulatory intervention would benefit the broader community beyond the affectedindividuals.
Please find enclosed Information Sheet 152 Publiccomment which sets out the limited circumstances when we will commentpublicly on our activities. These limitations are intended to protect theconfidentiality of information reported to ASIC and the integrity of ASIC’sinvestigation and enforcement activities. For matters involvingour market supervision, we are aware that any public comment may affect tradingin the market, and we are committed to a fair, orderly, and transparent market.
Accordingly, ASIC doesnot comment on operational matters, or our assessment of information inrelation to markets matters, and we are unable to provide further details aboutwhat, if any, action we may or may not take in relation to the concerns youhave raised. We hope you can appreciate the reasons why we do not make such comment.
So much for transparency!
My email back said that their statement "Accordingly, ASIC does not comment...." really does not satisfy, since it is exactly this lack of transparency that ISX shareholders are concerned about, especially when there is so much evidence of conflict of interest between the ASX and ISX."
But then, who am I, but a lonely retail investor and not one of the institutional brokers who put millions of transactions through the market for the (allegedly) purpose of market manipulation see:@gattertop post #42447415 with link
https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=b7dfed09-3374-4c6f-8a1c-7ac17aeeeeb1&subId=31219.
Am I really under the illusion that I can really effect change?
No. I don't think so.
