Mizuho Securities | |
Industry | Investment banking |
Headquarters | Ōtemachi, Tokyo, Japan |
Parent | Mizuho Corporate Bank, Ltd. |
Website | www |
Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. (みずほ証券株式会社 Mizuho Shōken Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese investment banking and securities firm. It is a subsidiary of Mizuho Corporate Bank, Ltd., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mizuho Financial Group, the second-biggest Japanese financial services conglomerate.
The current Mizuho Securities is established by a merger between Shinko Securities and the former Mizuho Securities. The former Shinko Securities (a former equity-method affiliate of Mizuho Financial Group) and the former Mizuho Securities (a former consolidated subsidiary of Mizuho Financial Group) merged on 7 May 2009. The surviving entity was the former Shinko Securities, which changed its name to Mizuho Securities upon the merger. After the merger, Mizuho Financial Group holds 59.51% equity ownership of the new Mizuho Securities.
On 8 December 2005, Mizuho Securities erroneously placed an order to sell 610,000 shares of J-COM Co., Ltd. for one yen each, instead of a commissioned order to sell one share of J-COM Co., Ltd. for 610,000 yen on the . J-COM Co., Ltd. (J-COM Holdings Co., Ltd. since December 2009) is a Japanese staffing service company, which was listed on the Mothers (market of the high-growth and emerging stocks) section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on the day. As a result of this incident, Mizuho Securities accrued a loss of approximately 40.7 billion yen.
Mizuho Securities brought a case for its damages of approximately 41.6 billion yen against the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) insisting that Mizuho Securities could not cancel the order due to a fault in the TSE's computer system, and that TSE negligently failed to suspend the exchange despite the recognition of such an unusual order.
On 4 December 2009, the Tokyo District Court made a judgment ordering TSE to pay Mizuho Securities approximately 10.7 billion yen, holding that: (i) TSE was grossly negligent in leaving its defective system which did not either duly process Mizuho Securities' cancellation or suspend the deal, and (ii) TSE was 70% at fault and Mizuho Securities was 30% at fault under Japanese comparative negligence rules.