Sydney man faces charges for market manipulation (ASIC, 2017)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 4, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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In September 2017 ASIC reported that Bondi man Benjamin Amzalak, a former key management person at Precious Metal Resources Limited, had appeared in the Downing Centre Local Court charged with ten counts of market manipulation over trades in 2013. In a media release of 9 September 2019 ASIC said he pleaded guilty to one offence and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment served by an intensive correction order.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission announced this matter on September 19, 2017 as release 17-319MR. The respondent named is Benjamin Amzalak. ASIC alleged that he made ten trades in the shares of Precious Metal Resources Limited between May and August 2013 that were likely to produce an artificial price under section 1041A of the Corporations Act; each charge carried up to ten years. The matter was prosecuted by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

Outcome: ASIC release 19-245MR of 9 September 2019 says Amzalak pleaded guilty in the District Court of New South Wales to one offence of market manipulation, covering eight transactions between 12 June and 2 August 2013 through trading accounts in the names of two companies, and was sentenced to two years of imprisonment to be served by way of an intensive correction order, with 300 hours of community service. The release does not state the sentencing date, so the date used is the release date, and does not say what happened to the other charges. The sentence is recorded as 24 months although it is served in the community rather than in custody.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation. The conduct is recorded against equities. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2017-09-19 ASIC media release
2. 2019-09-09 ASIC reports guilty plea and two-year sentence served by intensive correction order

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• ASIC media release
• ASIC media release 19-245MR (conviction and sentence)

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Same matter

The library links these 2 records because they appear to concern one matter: the same lead defendant, an overlapping technique tag and close filing dates, or a shared court docket or a release that cites the other. Records are listed by date filed.

This grouping is the library's, made by matching names, techniques, dates and citations when the site is built. It is not the regulator's or a court's determination that the records are one case, and it errs towards missing a link rather than making a false one.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.