FCA Investigations
When regulatory investigations occur, your business needs swift, pragmatic advice it can trust.
Our team of FCA investigations lawyers have complementary expertise from the criminal, civil, and regulatory sides. We help clients from across the financial services sector to assess, report, and liaise with regulators effectively and discretely throughout the investigation process.
If you have concerns about things gone wrong, we’ll help you to conduct an internal investigation. We can also help you if the FCA wrote to you, whether because you or your business is under direct investigation, or because you’re compelled to provide information. We’re used to dealing with s.166 Skilled Person Reviews, so we understand exactly what investigators would be looking for and what you would need to disclose.
FCA investigations can easily snowball into more complex issues, as regulatory breaches often have wider GDPR and criminal implications. Our data and information management experts can advise your data protection officers on investigation disclosure, and should you find yourself under suspicion of a criminal offence, our business crime specialists will advise on how to avoid, and defend yourself from, prosecution.
To protect your business’ operations and reputation from the potential negative repercussions of an FCA investigation, we recommend seeking legal advice as early as possible to benefit from legal privilege and ensure confidentiality.
We can help you to conduct internal investigations, and we can advise on both external investigations and regulatory disclosures relating to:
- Breaches of FCA principles and rules
- Economic and financial crime
- Fraud
- Money laundering
- Bribery & corruption
- Representing a finance brokerage in a complex FCA investigation, concerning its alleged role in multinational dividend arbitrage trading
- Working on a large-scale redress scheme for the mis-selling of interest rate hedging products. The review was carried out following an agreement between financial institutions and the FCA and the whole process was overseen by a third party s166 skilled person.
- Participating in s166 FSMA investigations by the FCA and internal investigations for allegations of wrongful trading, LIBOR fixing and a failure to be open with the FCA in a previous s166 investigation.
- Consideration of regulatory scope and drafting a Principle 11 disclosure letter for an insurance intermediary
- Leading complex investigations into corporates and individuals suspected of fraud, bribery and corruption, and money laundering in the UK and overseas
- Acting as part of the SFO team investigating and prosecuting the fraudulent manipulation of LIBOR, in collaboration with the FCA
