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Commerzbank has been ordered to pay a total of $1.45 billion in penalties, fire employees and install an independent monitor after it cleared transactions for entities in Iran and Sudan and facilitated payments for a Japanese company accused of accounting fraud.
March 12 -
New York could soon start holding bank executives personally responsible for their institutions' anti-money-laundering controls, the state's top financial regulator said Wednesday.
February 25
Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $258 million to the Federal Reserve and New York's Department of Financial Services, and to fire six employees, to resolve a probe into sanctions violations from 1999 to 2006 for allegedly handling transactions linked to Iran, Libya, Syria, Burma and Sudan.
The bank used "non-transparent methods" on more than 27,000 dollar-clearing transactions valued at more than $10.8 billion, New York's Department of Financial Services said Wednesday in a statement. Those methods included stripping information "indicating a connection to a sanctioned entity" before passing a payment along to a bank in the U.S.
"We are pleased that Deutsche Bank worked with us to resolve this matter and take action against individual employees who engaged in misconduct," Anthony Albanese, the acting superintendent of the DFS, said in the statement. "To truly deter future wrongdoing, it is important to focus not just on corporate accountability, but also individual accountability."
Under the agreement, New York will collect $200 million from the Frankfurt-based company, while the Fed will get $58 million, according to the statement. The bank will also install an independent monitor, DFS said.
More than 10 other global banks have resolved claims in recent years that they violated U.S. sanctions laws against Iran and other blacklisted nations -- in many cases, with penalties dwarfing the fines that Deutsche Bank is paying.
Earlier this year, Commerzbank, Germany's second-largest lender, paid $1.45 billion to settle claims it broke sanctions and money- laundering laws. Last year, BNP Paribas paid almost $9 billion and pleaded guilty to violating sanctions laws.
The New York banking regulator, the Justice Department and the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority also are investigating whether Deutsche Bank's Moscow office properly vetted as much as $6 billion in transactions that may have masked the flow of money out of Russia, people familiar with the matter have said. The bank is conducting its own review of the transactions, which are sometimes referred to as "mirror trades."
