By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-12-23 08:36:19 | Updated at 2024-12-23 12:48:49
4 hours ago
An Asia equity sales trader who was fired from Citigroup in 2019 won an employment suit against the US bank, Hong Kong’s Labour Tribunal ruled on Monday.
Citigroup failed to justify its “summary dismissal” of former employee Cindy Lui, Deputy Presiding Officer Grace Chan said at a hearing. Summary dismissal, or immediate termination without notice and payment in lieu of notice, typically happens when companies decide that employees have committed gross misconduct.
Lui was among a team of Hong Kong-based traders who were fired more than five years ago, after regulators in the city found long-running problems in how Citigroup’s Asia markets division communicated positions in certain stocks to clients.
Citigroup was fined HK$348.3 million (US$44.8 million) by the Securities and Futures Commission in 2022 for what the regulator called “pervasive dishonest behaviour” when executing stock trades for clients. Between 2008 and 2018, traders at the bank had at times indicated there was real customer demand to trade certain stocks when such orders did not exist, according to the SFC.
The bank’s Asia equity sales traders had mislabelled so-called “indications of interest” or IOIs, which are preliminary expressions of trading demand from buyers and sellers in certain stocks. When clients responded to the IOIs, Citigroup would often act as a principal and buy or sell stocks from them.
“We are reviewing the Tribunal’s decision and will make further comment in due course,” a Citigroup spokeswoman said.
