In a first, Morgan Stanley fined for UK Energy trading WhatsApp breach

A Morgan Stanley unit was fined £5.4 million ($6.8 million) for failure to retain messages sent by traders over WhatsApp in the first-ever penalty of its type issued under the powers of the UK’s energy regulator.

Morgan Stanley & Co. International Plc failed to record and save electronic communications between January 2018 and March 2020 made by energy traders on privately-owned phones which discussed transactions, Ofgem said in a statement on Wednesday.

Unlike US regulators, who have taken a slew of actions in the past couple of years — including billions of dollars in fines to clamp down on the use of WhatsApp across trading floors —