ASIC chair Longo outs Macquarie

The Macquarie Group board should be concerned that the usually measured chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Joe Longo, has pointedly referenced the company as a serial miscreant.

At the same time as announcing that ASIC has initiated court action against Macquarie Securities (Australia) over alleging “engaging in misleading conduct by misreporting millions of short sales” over 14 years, Longo also pointed out that it represented the regulator’s fourth regulatory action against Macquarie Group in just over 12 months.

“Our actions reflect the ongoing and deep concerns we have with Macquarie Group and its weak remediation of long-standing issues, which led us to impose additional conditions on Macquarie Bank’s Australian Financial Services licence only last week,” Longo said.

To understand the significance of Longo’s comments it needs to be understood that ASIC will have spent many months dealing with multiple areas of Macquarie Group interrogating the company’s systems and practices.

For Longo then to have made such a damning statement about the company signals that ASIC’s previous regulatory interactions with Macquarie have failed to achieve the desired outcomes and that, as a result, ASIC has become exasperated.

This much was indicted by ASIC’s reference to events dating back to 2025.

“Market Participants must ensure that their systems, controls and governance arrangements are robust and fit for purpose to comply with their regulatory obligations,” ASIC’s statement said.

“In 2020, MSAL undertook a review of its short sale reporting process following weaknesses identified in 2015 and 2019. It is clear this review failed to identify and resolve the issues in these proceedings.”

ASIC took the trouble in yesterday’s announcement to outline its 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.

It also noted that ASIC’s Markets Disciplinary Panel has issued a total of seven infringement notices to Macquarie Group entities for breaches of the Market Integrity Rules, amounting to $6.33 million in fines.