Securities Law Prof Blog

Editor: Eric C. Chaffee
Univ. of Toledo College of Law

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

NASDAQ Pays $10 Million Fine to Settle Facebook Offering Violations

The SEC and NASDAQ settled charges relating to the initial public offering (IPO) and secondary market trading of Facebook shares, with NASDAQ agreeing to settle the SEC’s charges by paying a $10 million penalty – the largest ever against an exchange.


According to the SEC’s order instituting settled administrative proceedings, despite widespread anticipation that the Facebook IPO would be among the largest in history with huge numbers of investors participating, a design limitation in NASDAQ’s system to match IPO buy and sell orders caused disruptions to the Facebook IPO.

NASDAQ then made a series of ill-fated decisions that led to the rules violations.  According to the SEC’s order, several members of NASDAQ’s senior leadership team decided not to delay the start of secondary market trading in Facebook with the expectation that they had fixed the system limitation by removing a few lines of computer code. However, they did not understand the root cause of the problem. NASDAQ’s decision to initiate trading before fully understanding the problem caused violations of several rules, including NASDAQ’s fundamental rule governing the price/time priority for executing trade orders. The problem caused more than 30,000 Facebook orders to remain stuck in NASDAQ’s system for more than two hours when they should have been promptly executed or cancelled.

The SEC’s order also charges NASDAQ’s affiliated third party broker-dealer NASDAQ Execution Services (NES) with failing to maintain sufficient net capital reserves on the day of the Facebook IPO as a result of NASDAQ’s own Facebook trading through the unauthorized error account.

The SEC’s order finds that NASDAQ violated Section 19(g)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by not complying with several of its own rules, and that NES violated Section 15(c)(3) of the Exchange Act and Rule 15c3-1 thereunder by failing to maintain sufficient net capital reserves on May 18, 2012. NASDAQ and NES agreed to a settlement without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings. The order censures NASDAQ and NES, imposes a $10 million penalty on NASDAQ, and requires both NASDAQ and NES to cease and desist from committing or causing these violations and any future violations. The order also requires NASDAQ and NES to complete numerous undertakings.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/2013/05/nasdaq-pays-10-million-fine-to-settle-facebook-offering-violations.html

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