A former financial adviser has been given a seven year jail term, on top of a permanent ban from providing financial services, relating to charges of fraud and forgery brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.The adviser, Darren Wise – the former owner of Financial Planning Services (Australia) – was sentenced in the Maroochydore District Court after having pleaded guilty in August to one count of forgery, using forged documents.
The charges relate to the conduct of Wise, formerly of Rhodes, NSW, between 23 October 1997 and 10 March 2006, when, as a financial adviser, he forged client signatures on margin loans and used the false applications with the intention of fraudulently inducing the lender to provide him with margin loans.
Wise was also found to gained a benefit for himself by fraudulently lodging securities owned by clients as collateral for the margin loans without the clients’ authorisation on 67 separate occasions and dishonestly obtaining more than $1 million under the margin loans as a result of his misapplication of client assets.
Wise was sentenced on 14 November 2016 and will be eligible for parole after serving 20 months of his sentence, and was permanently banned in February 2016.
In related news, a former adviser who was banned by ASIC from providing financial services for three years in relation to the alleged manipulation of the price derivative products has had the ban stayed by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) pending a review of the case.
ASIC had banned Michael James Spencer on 8 September after it found he engaged in manipulation of the price of three types of MINI warrants issued by Credit Suisse.
ASIC claimed that Spencer engaged in buying and selling of the MINI warrants across four separate days in May 2013 after pre-arranging the prices of the trades with a former employee of Credit Suisse in an effort to capture profits from the trades.
Spencer filed for a review and stay of ASIC’s decision in the AAT on 14 September, with the AAT making orders to stay the ban until the review is determined.
