The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition that amid the failure of the RCMP's specialized corporate crime unit to notch a single major corporate criminal conviction, the Ontario Securities Commission has created its own serious-offences unit to handle complex criminal cases destined for the courts. The Post's Theresa Tedesco writes the OSC has partnered principally with the Ontario Provincial Police and is in discussions with Toronto police and the RCMP to establish a new unit that will investigate and prosecute boiler-room operations, such as fraud and market manipulation and other illegal activities. Many of these are associated with organized crime. The OSC has created a group of 20 staffers, many of them former police officers and ex-Crown prosecutors, to create the serious-offences unit. This group operates on a separate floor with a computer network walled off from the rest of the regulator's staff to preserve the chain of command and evidence. The members have assorted weapons in their arsenal to pursue miscreants, including the ability to employ search warrants, wiretapping and undercover surveillance, which are allowed by the Criminal Code as part of their work in conjunction with the police.