Excessive Use of Consent Decrees by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the legal regulation of the Brazilian capital market, through literature research and assessment of documents and data, with focus on the revision of the regulatory instrument known as consent decree (settlement). A total number of 405 terms were approved by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) between 2009 and 2014, characterizing a wide use of such regulatory instrument. The present analysis concluded that, although the settlement is considered an important mechanism in the context of capital market regulation, its excessive use constitutes a distortion of both its purposes and of the foundations of normative discipline of the market, and even of the set of functions assigned to the CVM.

Keywords

• capital market
• regulation
• administrative sanctioning proceedings
• consent decree