The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is suing Macquarie Securities (Australia) Limited (MSAL) alleging it engaged in misleading conduct by misreporting millions of short sales to the market operator for over 14 years.

In proceedings filed in the NSW Supreme Court, ASIC alleges that between 11 December 2009 and 14 February 2024, MSAL failed to correctly report the volume of short sales by at least 73 million. ASIC estimates that this could be between 298 million and 1.5 billion short sales.

ASIC, in its first short sale reporting case, alleges the misleading conduct was due to multiple systems-related issues, many of which remained undetected for over a decade.

Today’s announcement follows other actions against Macquarie Group entities:

• On 7 May 2025, ASIC imposed additional AFS licence conditions on Macquarie Bank Limited following more than 10 years of compliance failures.
• In September 2024, ASIC’s Markets Disciplinary Panel (MDP) fined Macquarie Bank Limited a record $4.995 million for failing to prevent suspicious orders being placed on the electricity futures market.
• In April 2024, the Federal Court ordered Macquarie Bank Limited to pay a penalty of $10 million for failing to have effective controls to prevent and detect unauthorised fee transactions conducted by third parties, such as financial advisers, on customer cash management accounts using Macquarie’s bulk transacting facility.
• In June 2019, ASIC’s MDP fined MSAL $300,000 for failing to correctly report Regulatory Data for approximately 42 million orders or trade reports to the relevant market operators.

In addition to penalties, ASIC is seeking independent review and assurance of MSAL’s regulatory reporting (including short sale reporting) systems, controls and supervisory procedures to ensure compliance with the law.