Reprimand to SCGE Management, Limited Partnership for erroneous reporting of net short positions

The Danish Financial Supervisory Authority (“Danish FSA”) has on 15 March 2021 issued a reprimand to SCGE Management, Limited Partnership (“SCGE Management”) for violation of article 9 of the European Parliament and Council Regulation (EU) No 236/2012 on short selling and certain types of credit default swaps (“the SSR”).

Background

According to article 9 of the short selling regulation, a natural or legal person who has a short position must at midnight on the trading day on which the position is achieved calculate the net short position. If the net short position requires notification, cf. articles 5 and 6 of the short selling regulation, the natural and legal person must according to article 9 report the position to the relevant competent authority with correct details regarding the identity of the natural or legal person that holds the short position.

If the net short position is 0.2 % or more of the listed company’s issued share capital, the natural or legal person must report the position to the relevant competent authority no later than 3:30 pm on the following trading day. The European Markets and Securities Authority, ESMA, temporarily lowered the 0.2 % threshold to 0.1 %, effective from 16 March 2020. For shares admitted to trading on Danish trading venues, the Danish FSA is the relevant competent authority. If the net short position is 0.5 % or more of the listed company’s issued share capital, the Danish FSA will publish the net short position on its website. If the net short position falls below the threshold of 0.2 % of the listed company’s issued share capital, it must be reported to the Danish FSA (effective from 16 March 2020, the threshold has been 0.1 %).

At the beginning of February 2021, SCGE Management informed the Danish FSA of an erroneous net short position in a Danish issuer’s share capital that SCGE Management had already reported to the Danish FSA several months before. Furthermore, SCGE Management pointed out several other historical net short positions in the same issuer that had also been erroneously filed in the Danish FSA’s reporting system. SCGE Management explained that these errors had occurred because of human error and confusion in relation to SCGE Management’s user accounts in the Danish FSA’s reporting portal. 

In the autumn of 2020, SCGE Management had filed several net short positions in the Danish issuer’s share capital, several of which were above the public disclosure threshold of 0.5 %. SCGE Management had erroneously filed the net short positions on behalf of another company related to SCGE Management. However, the positions should have been filed on behalf of the company itself, SCGE Management.

SCGE Management contacted the Danish FSA on its own initiative in order to point out the filing errors that it had discovered. In connection with this, it became evident that several other net short positions in the Danish issuer’s share capital where SCGE Management was the position holder had also been erroneously filed on behalf of the above mentioned company related to SCGE Management. Mid-March SCGE Management corrected the errors. At the same time, SCGE Management provided the Danish FSA with a detailed explanation of why the errors had occurred and what initiatives it had taken in order for similar errors not to reoccur. 

Based on the above, the Danish FSA expects that SCGE Management will not report erroneous net short positions in the future.

For more information on short selling, the Danish FSA refers to its website