September 14, 2018

CFTC Orders ABN AMRO Clearing Chicago LLC to Pay a $160,000 Civil Monetary Penalty for Supervisory and Recordkeeping Failures

Washington, DC – The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today issued an Order filing and settling charges against ABN AMRO Clearing Chicago LLC (ABN), a Futures Commission Merchant, for failing to maintain certain required records and failing to supervise its employees and agents to ensure that ABN fulfilled its statutory and regulatory obligation to keep and promptly produce such records.

Specifically, the Order finds that from January 24, 2014 through August 28, 2015 (the Relevant Period) ABN failed to maintain electronic audit trail information relating to the trading of derivatives for a total of sixty-five clients.  In addition, the Order finds that during the Relevant Period ABN had no system in place to confirm that no anomalies existed in its data collection and preservation.  Thus, while ABN had a recordkeeping system in place, that system did not confirm that that it was accurately preserving audit trail data.  

On March 31, 2016, the CFTC’s Division of Enforcement (Division) issued a request pursuant to Section 4g, 7 U.S.C. § 6g (2012), for certain required records – specifically, audit trail data of an ABN client.  ABN produced data pursuant to this request, and the Division thereafter discovered significant gaps and missing transactions in the audit trail data.  The Division notified ABN of these issues, and, the Order finds, ABN was not aware of the gaps and missing transaction data until such notice from the Division.  The Order finds that after ABN was alerted to these problems by the Division, ABN made substantial efforts to repair and reconstruct the audit trail data impacted by the recordkeeping failures, and ultimately did reconstruct substantially all affected records.

The CFTC appreciates the cooperation and assistance of the CME Group.

The CFTC Division of Enforcement staff members responsible for this action are Raagnee Beri, Kim Bruno, Michelle Bougas, Diana Dietrich, Kathleen Banar, and Rick Glaser.