Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) vice chair Sohn Byungdoo held the first meeting of a task force, which will operate until the end of March 2021, on the prevention of unlawful and unfair trading activities in stock markets. His remarks in a statement noted the following:
The recent trends in stock market activities revealed potential problems, among them short selling activities: “As the period of Korea’s short selling ban was extended until March 15, 2021, it has become necessary to closely monitor illegal short sale activities during this period, including naked short selling.”
Other priorities of the task force include: growing risks of unfair trading activities surrounding particular groups of stock items, such as COVID-19 and “untact” sectors (also known as non-contact); price manipulation; and market abuse related to mergers and acquisitions and convertible bond issuance, among others.
The task force is comprised of officials from the FSC, Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) and securities exchange operator KRX, and will focus on the following three areas (a) strictly responding to unfair trading activities throughout the prevention, investigation and punishment stages (b) closely monitoring and examining the loopholes in the system and (c) working to improve the rules and regulations.