The Financial Services Authority will not use the enforcement of its principles to make new law, and will not force firms to follow its guidance. Jamie Symington, the FSA's head of wholesale enforcement, told regulatory lawyers that FSA guidance was a tool which firms could decide whether or not they wished to employ. Guidance was not a weapon to enable the regulator to create enforcement cases and make retrospective law, Symington told the inaugural meeting of the Financial Services Lawyers Association.
Opening a panel discussion of whether "principles-based regulation is an affront to the principle of legal certainty", Symington doubted that the FSA would act against individuals unless they were real outliers from industry standards. "It's much more likely that where there was a general issue, rather than going straight for an enforcement action, we would seek to raise standards by other means, either as part of the supervisory process or through guidance."
Symington said while
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