The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rescinded its 28-year-old “no-deny” settlement policy on June 3, 2026, three weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) scrapped its equivalent rule — meaning US-regulated FX, derivatives and crypto firms can now settle enforcement actions while publicly denying the allegations, a structural reset of settlement leverage that the UK and Australia have not followed.

The change removes Appendix A to Part 10 of the CFTC’s Rules of Practice (17 C.F.R. Part 10), codified in 1998, which barred the agency from accepting any settlement in which the respondent “wished to continue to deny the allegations” (CFTC Release 9247-26). The Commission has also said it will not enforce no-deny clauses in existing settlement agreements — retroactively unwinding a condition attached to hundreds of resolved cases. This analysis walks through what the rescission actually changes, how the four major enforcement jurisdictions now diverge, why the collapse of the My Forex Funds case sits in the background, and what settling firms and their counsel should expect in the second half of 2026.

Key Facts:

• The CFTC rescinded the no-deny policy in Appendix A to Part 10 of its Rules of Practice on June 3, 2026 — CFTC Release 9247-26
• The SEC eliminated its parallel “neither-admit-nor-deny denial bar” under Rule 202.5(e), in force since 1972, on May 19, 2026 — SEC announcement, via Pensions & Investments
• Existing no-deny clauses will not be enforced: no contempt motions, no reopened cases, no contract claims — Husch Blackwell client alert, June 26, 2026
• The CFTC retains discretion to demand admissions in individual cases; criminal-parallel carve-outs remain — Husch Blackwell
• Context: on May 13, 2025, the CFTC was sanctioned and ordered to pay $3.1 million after CFTC v. Traders Global Group (My Forex Funds) was dismissed with prejudice in the District of New Jersey — Finance Magnates / court filings
• The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) still operates its settlement-discount scheme under DEPP 6.7, with up to 30% penalty discounts for early settlement and published Final Notices — FCA Handbook

Methodology and sources

This analysis rests on primary documents: CFTC Release 9247-26 and the rescission of Appendix A to Part 10 (June 3, 2026), the Special Master’s report and sanctions ruling in CFTC v. Traders Global Group Inc. (D.N.J., May 13, 2025), and the FCA’s Decision Procedure and Penalties Manual (DEPP 6.7). Secondary analysis draws on the Husch Blackwell client alert of June 26, 2026 and contemporaneous reporting by Law360, Finance Magnates and Pensions & Investments. Jurisdictional scope: United States (CFTC, SEC), United Kingdom (FCA) and Australia (ASIC). Time window: May 2025 – July 2026. Caveat: the SEC and CFTC changes are policy rescissions, not rulemakings subject to comment, so their application will be visible only through settlement orders published from here on.

What the rescission actually says

Since 1998, the CFTC’s position was mechanical: a respondent who wanted to keep publicly denying the Commission’s allegations could not settle at all. The June 3 action deletes that precondition. “For nearly three decades, the Commission has refused to settle cases unless the defendant promised not to publicly deny the Commission’s allegations. I am pleased that we are rescinding the no-deny policy consistent with regulators throughout the government,” said CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig in the release (CFTC).

What does the end of the no-deny policy mean in practice? It means a US derivatives or FX firm can now resolve a CFTC enforcement action — paying a civil monetary penalty, accepting undertakings, agreeing to registration conditions — and then state publicly that it disputes the agency’s factual narrative. Under the old regime, that statement could trigger contempt proceedings, contract claims or an unwound settlement; under the new one, the CFTC has said it will bring none of those actions, even for clauses signed years ago. The change is narrower than it appears: the Commission expressly retains discretion to require admissions where it judges them necessary, and carve-outs preserving consistency with parallel criminal proceedings remain. What has gone is the blanket rule — not the agency’s ability to price a denial into the settlement terms it offers (Husch Blackwell, June 26, 2026).

David Miller, the CFTC’s Director of Enforcement, framed the move as harmonisation: “Today’s action harmonizes the Commission’s settlement approach with those taken by other agencies and ensures fairer resolutions in enforcement matters,” he said in the Commission’s release (National Law Review).

Jurisdiction / Regulator	Settlement speech rule	Status / date	Key reference	Practical effect
US — CFTC	No-deny precondition rescinded	June 3, 2026	Appendix A, Part 10, 17 C.F.R. (1998) — rescinded	Settle and publicly deny; legacy clauses unenforced; admissions still possible case-by-case
US — SEC	Denial bar under Rule 202.5(e) rescinded	May 19, 2026	17 C.F.R. § 202.5(e) (1972) — rescinded	Same flexibility; ends five decades of “gag rule” practice
UK — FCA	No formal gag rule; findings published in Final Notices	DEPP 6.7 in force	FCA Handbook DEPP 6.7; up to 30% stage-1 discount	Firms agree the Final Notice text; public denial of agreed findings undermines the discount bargain
Australia — ASIC	Court-approved penalties on agreed facts	Ongoing	Federal Court civil-penalty regime; agreed statements of facts	Court must find the agreed penalty appropriate; admissions typically embedded in the agreed facts

Sources: CFTC Release 9247-26; SEC rescission via Pensions & Investments; FCA Handbook (DEPP 6.7); Federal Court of Australia practice. Last updated July 9, 2026.

How the four regimes now diverge

The rescissions make the United States the outlier in the opposite direction from where it stood in January. A firm settling with the CFTC or SEC can now deny; a firm settling with the FCA technically faces no gag statute, but the architecture produces the same silence — the regulator publishes a Final Notice whose wording the firm has negotiated, and the up-to-30% settlement discount under DEPP 6.7 is the price of agreeing it. Publicly denying findings you contractually agreed would be published is commercially self-defeating, so UK firms do not do it. Australia goes further still: because civil penalties must be approved by the Federal Court on an agreed statement of facts, admissions are usually baked into the resolution itself.

Is there a regulatory-arbitrage angle for cross-border firms? A genuine one. A dually supervised broker or Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) resolving parallel investigations can now emerge from the US action denying everything while its UK resolution embeds agreed findings — and plaintiffs’ lawyers will read both documents side by side. Follow-on civil litigants in the US have historically leaned on the fact that a settling defendant could not deny the agency’s allegations; that inference is now gone, which weakens the collateral-estoppel-style leverage of a CFTC consent order in private class actions. The UK direction of travel is different again, with the FCA’s new gateway regime — examined in our FCA final crypto rules analysis — extending the published-findings model to crypto firms from 2027. Compliance teams at global firms should expect settlement negotiations to become genuinely different exercises by jurisdiction rather than translations of one playbook: substantive obligations converge, but the speech terms attached to resolving a breach no longer do.

“The vast majority of federal regulators never adopted a comparable rule.”

— Jeff Le Riche, Kip Randall and Sydney Sznajder, Husch Blackwell LLP, client alert on the CFTC rescission
(Government Enforcement Report)

Enforcement context: the shadow of My Forex Funds

The policy change cannot be read apart from the worst 18 months in the CFTC Division of Enforcement’s modern history. In CFTC v. Traders Global Group Inc. — the operator of prop-trading brand My Forex Funds — Judge Edward S. Kiel of the District of New Jersey dismissed the Commission’s fraud case with prejudice on May 13, 2025 and ordered the agency to pay $3.1 million in fees, after Special Master Jose L. Linares found the CFTC had mischaracterised a CAD $31.5 million corporate tax payment to the Canada Revenue Agency as evidence of misappropriation and then took steps to obfuscate the error (Finance Magnates; Special Master report). Four agency lawyers and an investigator were placed on leave in the aftermath.

That collapse matters here for two reasons. First, it destroyed the presumption that a CFTC complaint’s allegations are reliable enough to justify silencing settling defendants — the exact premise of a no-deny rule. Second, it left the Division needing settlements: litigating to judgment is now riskier for the agency, and a settlement policy that excluded every defendant unwilling to stay silent was shrinking the pool of resolvable cases. The contrast with the agency’s marquee resolution — the $2.7 billion Binance settlement of November 2023, agreed under the old no-deny regime — shows the stakes: future Binance-scale orders may now carry public denials attached, and the deterrence value of the press release will depend on the admissions the CFTC chooses to bargain for case by case.

What this means for brokers, CASPs, fund managers and compliance teams

For US-regulated futures commission merchants, introducing brokers and retail FX dealers, the near-term effect is negotiating room: counsel can trade a higher penalty or tighter undertakings against the freedom to maintain public denial — an option that did not exist in January. For crypto exchanges and CASPs with parallel state, federal and overseas exposure, settlement sequencing now matters more: resolve the US action first and a public denial remains available; resolve the FCA action first and the agreed Final Notice constrains the global narrative. For fund managers, the diligence signal from a counterparty’s consent order has weakened — an order no longer implies the firm accepts the facts — so counterparty-risk teams should weight the order’s substantive undertakings, not its recitals. And for legal teams holding legacy settlements: the CFTC has said old no-deny clauses are dead letters, but the SEC and CFTC positions are policy statements by the current commissions, not statutes — a future commission could reverse course, so public denials of settled allegations still deserve a risk sign-off, not a victory lap.

The forward view: what to watch through 2026

Three things will define how much this matters. First, the first post-rescission settlement orders: whether the CFTC starts demanding admissions more often precisely because the blanket denial bar is gone — the Husch Blackwell team notes the agency “retains discretion to demand admissions when appropriate”. Second, spillover into adjacent dockets: the CFTC is simultaneously reshaping its remit over event contracts and crypto perpetual futures, covered in our analyses of how regulators are closing in on retail prop trading and the wider enforcement split examined in our US crypto perpetuals versus UK and EU retail rules piece — settlement flexibility will be tested first in exactly these novel-product cases. Third, the jurisdictional expansion question: the CFTC’s contested push into event contracts against state gaming regulators, and the CLARITY Act’s proposed reallocation of digital-asset jurisdiction, would hand the agency a far larger enforcement surface at the very moment its settlement terms became more defendant-friendly. UK and EU authorities, meanwhile, show no sign of following: the FCA’s discount scheme and the EU’s administrative-fine regimes are structurally incompatible with settle-and-deny.

FAQ

What was the CFTC’s no-deny settlement policy?

A policy codified in 1998 in Appendix A to Part 10 of the CFTC’s Rules of Practice stating the Commission would not accept any settlement if the respondent wished to continue publicly denying the allegations. It was rescinded on June 3, 2026 via CFTC Release 9247-26.

Can firms now deny wrongdoing after settling with the CFTC?

Yes. A settling respondent may publicly deny the allegations while still paying penalties and accepting undertakings. The CFTC has also said it will not enforce no-deny clauses in pre-2026 settlements — no contempt motions, reopened cases, or contract claims.

Did the SEC make the same change?

Yes, first. The SEC eliminated its “neither-admit-nor-deny” denial bar under 17 C.F.R. § 202.5(e) — in force since 1972 — on May 19, 2026. The CFTC followed on June 3, aligning both major US market regulators.

How does the UK’s FCA approach differ?

The FCA has no formal gag rule, but settlements under DEPP 6.7 of its Handbook involve agreeing the text of a published Final Notice in exchange for up to a 30% penalty discount, which makes subsequent public denial commercially and procedurally self-defeating. The practical outcome resembles the old US regime.

What is the connection to the My Forex Funds case?

CFTC v. Traders Global Group (My Forex Funds) was dismissed with prejudice on May 13, 2025, with the CFTC sanctioned $3.1 million for mischaracterising a CAD $31.5 million tax payment as misappropriation. The collapse damaged the credibility premise behind silencing settling defendants and increased the agency’s need for workable settlements.

Does the CFTC still require admissions in some settlements?

It can. The rescission removes the blanket precondition, not the agency’s discretion: the Commission may still demand admissions case by case, and carve-outs preserving consistency with parallel criminal proceedings remain in place, per the Husch Blackwell analysis of June 26, 2026.

This article is informational analysis only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, tax, or investment advice. Regulatory frameworks change frequently and interpretation depends on facts and circumstances; primary documents and official regulator guidance always supersede summaries. Firms should consult qualified legal counsel and their relevant supervisory authority before taking any action based on the analysis above.