Tausi Insider

Sam Bankman-Fried chief executive of FTX, a crypto derivatives exchange that offers products unavailable to traders in the U.S., sits in the company's offices in Hong Kong, on May, 26, 2021. LAM YIK FEI/The New York Times News Service Adam Chisholm is a partner and group head of the complex disputes and regulatory regimes group at McMillan LLP and has experience in securities regulatory and administrative law. The views expressed are his own. Is bitcoin a security? A commodity? Something else? These simple questions have traditionally not had simple answers, even in places where there are modern securities laws. There is one difference between jurisdictions around the world, however. The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) – Canada’s de facto chief regulator, given the province’s status as a financial centre – has chosen to align with the United States in taking zealous enforcement action against cryptocurrency trading platforms. The recent implosion of the US$32-billion-dollar, ...

The crash of FTX exchange has injected greater urgency into regulating the crypto sector and targeting such ‘conglomerate’ platforms will be the focus for 2023, the new chair of global securities watchdog IOSCO said in an interview. Jean-Paul Servais said regulating crypto platforms could draw on principles from other sectors which handle conflicts of interest, such as at credit rating agencies and compilers of market benchmarks, without having to start from scratch. Cryptoassets like bitcoin have been around for years but regulators have resisted jumping in to write new rules. But the implosion at FTX, which left an estimated one million creditors facing losses totalling billions of dollars, will help change that, Servais told Reuters. “The sense of urgency was not the same even two or three years ago. There are some dissenting opinions about whether crypto is a real issue at the international level because some people think that it’s still not a material issue and risk,” Servais sa...

The Liberal government’s proposed tax on stock buybacks is going to be expensive for a number of Canadian companies. Unfortunately, investors can’t be sure of which ones, and by how much. The reason – and I know this will shock you – is that Canadian disclosure requirements for companies’ buyback activity have lagged U.S. rules for nearly 20 years. And the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would like to expand what companies there reveal, which threatens to widen the information gap with Canada. To review, the government said earlier last month it plans to introduce a 2-per-cent tax on share buybacks starting in 2024. The idea is ripped off from the United States, which in August brought in a 1-per-cent tax on stock buybacks, starting in 2023. A lot of the discussion of the proposal is black-and-white: The Liberal government clearly sees buybacks as a diversion of capital from job-creating investment; business groups have said the buybacks are a legitimate capital-management t...