VietNamNet Bridge – The State Securities Commission (SSC) has placed nine securities firms under special surveillance, and five others under scrutiny.

SSC has requested the boards of directors and CEOs of these enterprises to build plans for fixing their problems.

Concerning a securities firms restructuring scheme, SSC has since early this year suspended four companies from operation over failures to cope with their losses after a period of special scrutiny and their accumulative losses exceeding half of their chartered capital.

The stock market regulator is also considering withdrawing the licenses of three other brokers while forcing others to stop providing proprietary trading, brokerage and underwriting services.

In the first six months of this year, SSC inspected three securities companies, with three branches and three transaction offices shut down.

Financial statements of securities firms showed that 65 out of 95 firms had incurred total losses of over VND6 trillion by late 2012.

Loss-making enterprises have shown shortcomings in business or risk management. Some of them have infringed financial safety standards, incurred losses or even cut into properties and interests of customers.

Authorities have detected nearly 3,000 cases in which investors used two accounts or more to transact the same stock in a session. However, sanctions against this practice provided in the current law remain light.

SSC in the first half issued 40 administrative fine decisions against organizations and individuals but these fines totaled only VND2.9 billion.

To speed up the securities firm restructuring process, SSC has taken some measures to deal with problems in the withdrawal of establishment and operation licenses. Substandard firms would lose their licenses after they have completed all debt obligations with customers.

Source: SGT