British bank Barclays agreed to a $361 million penalty over internal control failures related to the unregistered offer and sale of “an unprecedented amount” of securities, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Thursday.
The conduct concerned dates back to March this year when Barclays disclosed that it had accidentally oversold complex structured and exchange-traded notes, overshooting by about 75 percent a $20.8 billion limit on such sales it had agreed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The bank had failed to implement any internal controls to track such transactions in real time, the SEC found.
“While we acknowledge Barclays’ efforts to identify, disclose, and remediate this conduct, the control deficiencies and the scope of the conduct at issue here was simply staggering,” the director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, Gurbir Grewal, said in a news release….