HSBC's embattled markets business hired a new head of compliance from Cantor

At a time when U.S. regulators are preparing to fine HSBC for spoofing and manipulation in the U.S. futures market, the firm's embattled markets business has hired a new head for compliance for Americas region.

Nicholas Sahadi, who served as the chief compliance officer for Cantor Fitzgerald for the last three years, has joined HSBC Global Banking and Markets as a managing director in New York.

Earlier this week, a CNBC report said that the U. S. derivatives regulator will fine European lenders HSBC, UBS and Deutsche Bank millions of dollars each for spoofing, which involves placing bids to buy or offers to sell futures contracts with the intent to cancel them before execution. It creates an illusion of demand and hence can influence prices to benefit the spoofers. HSBC's fine will reportedly be slightly less than $10 million, while the fines for UBS and Deutsche Bank will be upward of this.

This is the second setback for HSBC in the past six months. In September last year, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank fined HSBC $175m for unsafe and unsound practices in its foreign exchange trading business. HSBC had failed to monitor chat rooms where traders swapped information about investment positions, which led to market manipulation.

Sahadi comes with 18 years of experience and has been dealing with compliance issues for financial services firms for well over a decade. He started his career with Pershing, a subsidiary of the Bank of New York Mellon, in 1999 as an assistant vice president and moved on to Lehman Brothers as a vice president for equities compliance five years later. In 2008, he joined Barclays as a director for equities compliance and spent a little of three years there before joining Direct Edge as the head of compliance. He left Direct Edge for Cantor in December 2014.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)