The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has permanently banned former financial advisor Neil Bruce Trower from providing any financial services, saying that he applied clients' signatures to documents without informing them for the purpose of passing an internal compliance audit.

Trower used to work as a representative of Millennium 3 Financial Services Pty Ltd (M3). He was also an employee of Lifestyle Financial Services (a corporate representative of M3) who provided risk advice in Brisbane. M3 has an Australian financial services licence and is ultimately owned by the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ).

ASIC found that between August 2015 and December 2015, Mr Trower failed to give some clients a statement of advice, as required by law, at the time he provided them with financial advice and he 'applied' the signatures of a number of clients to both internal and external documents for the purpose of passing an internal compliance audit. ASIC found his conduct to be dishonest, as he did not tell the affected clients that he had applied their signatures to documents. He submitted these documents to the internal audit team knowing that the team would rely on the documents as being genuine during the conduct of the audit. The team then found him out, identifying irregularities in the signatures and reporting them to ASIC. The Australian regulator is far less forgiving of people who forge the signatures of HNW clients than its British counterpart, the Financial Conduct Authority.

The banning of Trower, who has the right to appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, is part of ASIC's Wealth Management Project which the regulator established in October 2014 to beef up compliance among Australia's major financial advice providers. It concentrates on the conduct of the largest financial advice firms (NAB, Westpac, CBA, ANZ, Macquarie and AMP). So far, ASIC has banned 38 advisors from the financial services industry as part of this clean-up operation. Two of these bans are the subject of appeals.

Elsewhere, ASIC has decided to preserve disclosure relief for an offer of securities to a director or secretary. It has done this by remaking a class order [CO 04/899] that would otherwise have expired on 1 October and has done so with hardly any changes to the rule. In accordance with Australia's Legislation Act 2003, all class orders are repealed automatically after a period of time (mostly 10 years) unless the regulator takes action to preserve them, the better to keep them fresh and relevant. A senior manager is a person who is concerned in, or takes part in, the management of the body (regardless of the person’s designation and whether or not the person is a director or secretary of the body)”.