Sydney-based stockbroking firm Petra Capital Pty Ltd has been fined $205,350 by the Markets Disciplinary Panel (MDP) for misreporting regulatory data on more than 3,600 occasions.

Following an investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the MDP found Petra Capital breached the market integrity rules by failing to provide accurate information, being a unique code used to identify clients executing orders or transactions.

Petra Capital’s inconsistent use of client reference information when reporting regulatory data led to one client appearing as multiple clients on 3,632 occasions. This was caused by a system update and affected 14,741 trades between 3 March 2022 and 5 December 2023.

The MDP considered Petra Capital to be ‘careless’ and found that it should have taken steps to ensure its reporting format complied with the law, including by proactively and periodically reviewing its systems and the underlying assumptions in its coding.

In its decision, the MDP noted the importance of market participants’ core obligation to provide accurate regulatory data, including consistent client reference information, which is critical to ASIC’s role in supervising markets and ensuring market integrity.

Petra Capital is a small Australian institutional stockbroking firm that provides services to wholesale financial clients and ASX-listed companies. Petra Capital is a market participant of ASX Limited and Cboe Australia Limited.