The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong has suspended Mr Singh Amit Kishan, a former employee of Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd, for seven months.

The suspension, which will run until 15 May 2025, is for regulatory breaches.

The disciplinary action follows an SFC investigation which found that between 17 December 2018 and 11 February 2019, Singh, a private banker of Julius Baer, misrepresented to his then employer that he had a face-to-face meeting with a client on 10 December 2018 in Hong Kong as part of the required account opening procedure.

He also advised the client through text messaging to make 14 transactions between 21 June 2019 and 20 February 2020 in a manner which created a false appearance of unsolicited trades when that was not the case.

As a matter of fact, 11 transactions involved products which were not allowed for solicitation under Julius Baer’s then applicable policies, and they would not have been allowed to proceed in the circumstances. The rest would have required pre-trade approval due to concentration risks had they been solicited, which Singh did not obtain.

All in all, Singh circumvented Julius Baer’s procedures on account opening, know-your-client (KYC) and product suitability. As a result, Julius Baer was prevented from properly monitoring staff conduct in these areas and its resulting compliance with the applicable KYC and suitability requirements under the Code of Conduct.

In deciding the sanction against Singh, the SFC has taken into account a variety of factors, including his otherwise clean disciplinary record.