The Security and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) has decided to crack down against the online gurus of the stock market that regularly express their opinions on social media.
According to a local newspaper, Yasir Manzoor, head of the SECP’s Market Surveillance, Supervision and Enforcement Department, at a workshop said,
“Behaving like stock market gurus and making suggestions about investments are illegal. This is a form of manipulation called inducement, which is a crime under Securities Act 2015.”
According to him, there are many market manipulations taking place online such as wash trade, pump-and-dump, spoofing and false statements. The recent form of market manipulation is the issuance of false statements through social media and the SECP has already forwarded 33 links to the FIA.
The SECP has taken serious notice of some brokerage houses’ involvement in spoofing and to curtail market manipulation SECP has filed seven criminal complaints in the current year against market abuses and two criminal complaints against the senior employees of two banks for being involved in booking profits through insider trading.
