SC: 2011 civil actions

On December 7th, 2011 the Securities Commission published the following list of civil actions:

http://www.sc.com.my/main.asp?pageid=1121&menuid=&newsid=&linkid=&type=

Many actions involve regulatory settlements regarding alleged insider trading.

I wrote about insider trading and the apparent lack of enforcement before:

http://cgmalaysia.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-smoke-signals-are-right.html

The fact that action has been taken is good, this should act as some sort of deterrent.

However, there are two clear negatives:

• Some of these cases are very old, even up to eight years. Why does it take so unbelievable long before any action is taken?
• In all actions, the following text can be found: "when they agreed without admission or denial of liability, to settle a claim that the SC was proposing to institute against them for insider trading". This is a quite common way to settle matters in the USA, but I don't like it very much. Did the alleged insider trading indeed take place, or was the alleged perpetrator so fed up with the process that he/she was willing to settle?

Bursa Malaysia won 4 international awards for Corporate Governance. They gave the right example to other Malaysian listed companies, which is good. But I really hope they will step up their enforcement in a big way and definitely in a much faster way.