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by Bartweiss
3621 days ago
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Overall, I appreciate the article, but it seems to oversell the claim that this wasn't fraud. They made a purchase on behalf of a client, then lied to that client about when they were trading and who else was trading. The front-running claims are messy at best, but there are other claims here that seem to be bulletproof. When someone hires you for a transaction, and you explicitly, provably lie to them about the nature of that transaction, surely that's fraud? HSBC made claims to a client that were blatantly false, expressly for the purpose of extracting more funds from that client's transaction. |
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That's the thing though: Technically and legally, they did not do this.
An agent buys things on your behalf from the people who are selling them; they have an obligation to obtain the best price for you. A principal is selling you things which they bought on their behalf; they have an obligation to sell to you at the price you agreed. And in this case, HSBC was a principal, not an agent. They made no purchases on behalf of the client; they made purchases on their own behalf so that HSBC could fulfill the order that the client had placed with HSBC.
It's awkward though because it looks a bit like they were buying on behalf of a client, and it probably felt to the client like they were acting as an agent, and the price they agreed on was one that HSBC had some control over, which is really not a good idea at all without an agent relationship. And yet: The purchase was not being made on behalf of the client and HSBC was not an agent of the customer.
> surely that's fraud?
Simplifying a lot: Only if the customer relied on those lies. If I sell you a used car and I say the last owner's first name was Bob, and it was actually Bill, and you later regret the purchase, it's not fraud, because you can't truthfully say that but for my lies you would not have purchased the car. If I say the last owner was a little old lady who drove it down to the shops once a week, but they were actually an uber driver who drove it 60 hours a week, then maybe that was a material and would have impacted your decision. (That's a question for a jury.)
Offhand, the lies about Russians sound horrible, but I'm not sure what impact it had on the customer's decisions, especially since it happened after they agreed to the trade. Now, the lies about liquidity to get them to agree to the 3pm fix might qualify though...