The SEC announced charges against market access provider Wedbush Securities Inc. and two officials for violating the SEC's market access rule that requires firms to have adequate risk controls in place before providing customers with access to the market. The SEC's order alleges that Wedbush, which has consistently ranked as one of the five largest firms by trading volume on NASDAQ, failed to maintain direct and exclusive control over settings in trading platforms used by its customers to send orders to the markets, as required bySEC Rule 15c3-5("Risk Management Controls for Brokers or Dealers

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board ("MSRB") requested approval from the SEC of a proposal to amend MSRB Rule G-3(a) ("Classification of Principals and Representatives; Numerical Requirements; Testing; Continuing Education Requirements"), Rule G-7 ("Information Concerning Associated Persons"), and Rule G-27 ("Supervision"). The amendments to Rule G-3(a), which will also affect Rules G-7 and G-27, include: limiting the scope of permitted activities for a limited representative – investment company and variable contracts products to sales to, and purchases from, customers of municipal fund

The Directors Registration and Licensing Law, 2014 ("the Law") was published in the Cayman Islands Gazette of The Directors Registration and Licensing Regulations and is now effective and in force. The Law provides that those persons acting as directors of a covered entity must register with, or obtain a license from, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. For purposes of the Law, a "covered entity" means a mutual fund regulated under the Mutual Funds Law and certain "Excluded Persons" under the Securities Investment Business Law. Three classes of directors will be regulated: (i) "registered

SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher discussed the SEC's corporate disclosure requirements, focusing on the extent to which those requirements have been misdirected to purposes other than providing benefits to investors. Commissioner Gallagher stated that the SEC is imposing too many frivolous reporting requirements, and that these requirements impede economic recovery. He asserted that the "increasing encroachment" of congressionally mandated governance-related disclosure requirements distracts the SEC from its core purpose of requiring material information that is considered significant by the

On Thursday, June 5, 2014, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) chaired a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on developments in Ukraine. Witnesses at the hearing included Jane Harman (President and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), Steven Pifer (Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Ambassador to Ukraine), James Jeffrey (Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute and former Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor), Mark Green (President of the International Republican Institute) and Kenneth Wollack (President of the