In a report submitted to the brokerage the same day, the panel of three lawyers also stated that both management and employees had lacked norms that could have averted the alleged market manipulation, which led to the arrests and indictments of the company's former deputy president and five others.
The panel urged SMBC Nikko to strengthen its compliance and establish a structure that would enable the company to identify misconducts.
The report also found that company President
The email, sent to Kondo and some other executives, mentioned utilizing the company's own position to support the price of a stock when it fell.
Kondo told the panel that he did not remember whether he had read the email.
"I feel very responsible that brokerages' mission to protect the integrity and fairness of the market was not widely acknowledged and enforced at my company," Kondo said at a press conference in
He said he was not involved in any misconduct involving transactions called "block offerings."
In block offerings, a brokerage mediates trading between large shareholders who want to sell chunks of shares and investors hoping to buy them during off-hours trading. The brokerage profits from the difference between the purchase and sale prices.
Along with the six officials, SMBC Nikko was also indicted by the
While block offerings are common and legal, the prosecutors suspect that the stock prices were illegally propped up so the transactions would not fall through.
==Kyodo
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