Samsung Securities suffered extreme embarrassment when one of the employees of the stock-trading entity accidentally issued shares worth some $105 billion to 2,018 of its employees who are members of its stock-owner program. The employees in the program were supposed to receive a dividend totaling $2 billion — or about 93¢ per share they owned — but were mistakenly issued 2 billion shares instead. The amount issued was more than 30 times the total number of outstanding Samsung Securities’ shares. Samsung Securities admitted that it took 37 minutes to fix what had occurred after it became aware of the problem. Even more humiliating, 16 Samsung Security employees were able to still sell off some 5 million shares of their payout, despite repeatedly being warned not to do so by their managers. The combined action of the mistake, along with the rogue employee share sell-offs, helped decrease Samsung Securities’ stock price by nearly 12%. Although Samsung Securities had already fired the employees and announced that it would make amends to any stockholder who lost money because of the incident, South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service indicated that it still planned to deal harshly with both the brokerage and its now terminated employees.
