FCA v. 7722656 Canada Inc (formerly Swift Trade Inc) (layering, 2014)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 3, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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On 24 January 2014, the Financial Conduct Authority issued a final notice imposing a GBP 8,000,000 penalty on 7722656 Canada Inc, a dissolved Toronto company that had traded as Swift Trade Inc, for market abuse. The penalty had originally been decided in a 2011 Decision Notice; this library tags the matter as layering. The final notice itself is a confirmatory document: it records that the Upper Tribunal found deliberate market abuse in January 2013 and that the Court of Appeal upheld that finding in December 2013, after Swift Trade and its former CEO, Peter Beck, challenged the case, but it does not itself narrate the trading conduct.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

£8m

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars. This regulator states penalties in GBP. The figure is recorded as published and is not converted, so it does not appear in the USD totals or medians used elsewhere on this site.

What is alleged to have happened

The Financial Conduct Authority issued this final notice on January 24, 2014, closing out an enforcement matter against 7722656 Canada Inc, a Toronto company dissolved in December 2010 that had traded as Swift Trade Inc. The respondent named is 7722656 Canada Inc (0 individuals, 1 entity).

The FCA (as the Financial Services Authority until April 2013) had already decided, in a Decision Notice given on 6 May 2011, to impose a financial penalty of GBP 8,000,000 for engaging in market abuse. Swift Trade and Peter Beck, its former President and CEO, who was given a copy of the Decision Notice as a third party the Authority considered the matter prejudicial to, referred that decision to the Upper Tribunal (Tax and Chancery Chamber). The Tribunal's written decision, released 23 January 2013, determined that Swift Trade had engaged in deliberate market abuse. Swift Trade and Mr Beck then appealed to the Court of Appeal, which dismissed the appeal and upheld the Tribunal's decision on 19 December 2013. This final notice, issued the following month, confirms the GBP 8,000,000 penalty and notes that the Court of Appeal agreed Swift Trade retained sufficient remaining existence, despite its dissolution, for the Authority to act against it.

This library tags the matter as layering. The final notice itself does not describe the trading mechanism; it recites only the procedural history summarised above and directs readers to the Tribunal's published decision for the underlying findings. The tag rests on the Court of Appeal's judgment of 19 December 2013 (neutral citation [2013] EWCA Civ 1662, read for this check), which describes the finding as layering: placing large orders on one side of the book with no genuine intention to execute them, to move the price, then trading on the other side and cancelling. The conduct ran on the London Stock Exchange between January 2007 and January 2008. The final notice itself does not use that language. No penalty or finding is recorded against Mr Beck personally in this notice; he appears only as a third party and as a co-appellant.

The conduct is recorded against equities, consistent with the exchange-traded market abuse the underlying case concerned.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above, and the Tribunal decision it cites, for the underlying conduct. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Layering — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2011-05-06 FSA Decision Notice imposing the GBP 8,000,000 penalty
2. 2013-01-23 Upper Tribunal decision upholding deliberate market abuse finding
3. 2013-12-19 Court of Appeal judgment dismissing the appeal
4. 2014-01-24 FCA final notice

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• FCA final notice
• Court of Appeal judgment [2013] EWCA Civ 1662

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 29, 2026. submit a correction.