The Financial Services Authority today issued two record fines in a clear signal that the watchdog means to step up pressure on companies and individuals that threaten the City's integrity.

Sun Life, a division of the French insurance company Axa, was fined £500,000 for issuing misleading and incorrect advertisements - a record for a case of its kind.

Meanwhile, Robert Bonnier, the fallen dot.com star, was fined £290,000 for wrongly claiming to own shares in office rental group Regus. Indigo Capital, the Finance group, was also fined £65,000 in the same case.

Mr Bonnier's fine was the largest ever imposed on an individual by the FSA, nearly doubling the old record of £150,000 levied on Christopher Goekjian, the former chief executive of Credit Suisse Financial Products, for his part in attempts to mislead the Japanese tax authority.

Record advertising fine levied on Sun Life

Sun Life said that it regretted "shortcomings" in advertisements used to promote its Bonus Cash Builder Plus Plan - a with-profit endowment assurance policy - and Guaranteed Over 50, a non-profit, whole-of-life policy that provided a fixed guaranteed sum on the death of the policyholder.

Around 200,000 people who bought one of the two products will be given the option to cancel their policy and receive a full refund of premiums, plus interest.

The FSA said the fine - the biggest levied for misleading advertisements - would have been higher had Axa's unit, Axa Sun Life, not co-operated with the investigation.

"The FSA takes the issue of misleading financial promotions very seriously. We expect firms to comply with the spirit, not just the letter, of the rules, so that consumers gain a clear and fair understanding through the promotion," the FSA's director of enforcement, Andrew Procter, said.

The advertisements, some of which featured the television celebrities Carol Smillie and June Whitfield, were part of a TV and print media campaign which included direct-offer promotions distributed between February 2002 to January 2004, thereby putting a significant number of consumers at risk of being misled, the FSA said.

The advertisements did not provide customers with sufficient information about how the products worked or the risks involved, and some included comparative data that was incorrect, it added.

The serious nature of Axa Sun Life’s breaches was compounded by the firm’s failure to promptly inform the FSA of their mistake in the data, the watchdog said.

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