"FEELING YOUR (WHITE) COLLAR?" FCA Prosecutions & Enforcement Action

The Red Lion Lecture series is organised by Red Lion Chambers and hosted in collaboration with The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London.

Abstract

The challenges facing financial institutions and their regulators are changing. This lecture will include an examination of a number of those challenges:

• Digitisation and fintech provide new opportunities but can regulators keep pace?
• The FCA continues to focus on individuals. What has been the impact of the Senior Managers’ Regime and will it make a difference to the FCA’s enforcement priorities?
• Enforcement action now makes the link between culture and governance. What does that mean for our clients and how can we help them to respond?

There will also be a review of emerging trends in Cybercrime and AML:

• Cybercrime is on the increase and grabs headlines when customer data is jeopardised. There will be a discussion of the scale of and issues arising from recent FCA fines for cyber-attacks.
• AML is a hot topic as regards the prevention of financial crime and continues to take centre stage for regulators globally. Recent enforcement action has brought huge fines and increased regulatory requirements for regulated firms. Who will police and prosecute this territory in the future?

Brexit looms large over the financial sector, with pressure on everything from contractual enforceability and market standard trading terms to loss of and interruption to market access. What will
this mean for financial services regulation? How will the FCA and its fellow regulators across Europe keep markets clean and investigations moving? With uncertainty over which regulatory regime will apply,
and how misconduct will be enforced – and by whom – by the date of this lecture there will be much to discuss.

The session will look back at significant events in financial services regulation over the last 12 months, debate developing trends in enforcement and look ahead to what is coming down the track.

Speaker Biographies

Cameron Brown (Red Lion Chambers) is principally instructed in serious and complex fraud and corruption cases.

He has significant experience in the prosecution and defence of cases involving fraudulent trading, ponzi schemes, money laundering, benefit fraud, duty evasion, conspiracy to defraud, Fraud Act related offences, VAT/ Carousel fraud, Carbon Credit fraud and Cheating the public revenue. He has also acted in a number of serious cases involving prosecutions of Companies and individuals by the Insolvency Service.

In 2017 he was appointed as Standing Counsel to the Insolvency Service. Cameron has lectured at the Inns of Court School of Law in relation to ethics and to the City of London Police in relation to Fraud Offences. He has contributed to Lexis-Nexis in relation to Bankruptcy and Insolvency Offences and Westlaw in relation to Cheating the Public Revenue/ VAT fraud. He is author of the newsletter ‘Fraud Matters’.

Ruby Hamid (Counsel at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and soon to be Partner at Ashurst) is a global investigations and corporate crime practitioner, specialising in white-collar crime, financial regulation, global investigations and risk and compliance.

Ruby advises corporate clients across a wide range of matters. She is experienced in multi jurisdictional investigations and matters with multi-agency involvement and has defended clients under investigation for global corruption, serious fraud, direct and indirect tax fraud and money-laundering. Her career has involved prosecuting financial crime for the FCA, HMRC and CPS, defending corruption cases brought by the SFO, and litigating a broad range of regulatory and disciplinary cases.

Following 13 years at the Bar, Ruby spent 4 years as Counsel at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and is shortly to join Ashurst as a partner.