The Estonian financial regulator Finantsinspektsioon (The Estonian Financial Supervision and Resolution Authority) fined Admiral Markets AS, which is a local subsidiary of the Admiral Markets Group with 32,000 euro for the way the company handled the oil crisis prices last year in its trading platform.
According to the regulator, the broker changed the terms of financial assets without notifying its users. To be more precise, the company changed the way by which calculates the prices of crude oil and it increased the overnight fees for a number of securities.
According to the regulator, these changes were not transparent and clients that had bought these specific assets had to restructure their trading operations and approaches from scratch, which led to a risk of losing their funds without them even knowing it.
What a rotten thing to do on the part of Admiral Markets. I understand it was a time of crisis, but would it have hurt to send an email to all users notifying them about what they were doing?