Those big banking fiascos just won’t go away. Ripple effects keep showing up.
Here are two ripples that I noticed just yesterday from the money laundering mess, one for Bank of Tokyo and another with BNP.
11/18 – Wall Street Journal – Bank of Tokyo to Pay $315 Million to N.Y. Regulator – This fine is for misleading the N.Y. Department of Financial Services in a report describing how many wires the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi sent that violated US law on not trading with Iran, Sudan, and Myanmar. The bank acknowledged it mislead the regulator and agreed to a $315M fine, agreed to extend the timeline for external monitoring, and actually disciplined three staff.
This is in addition to the $250M fine paid to DFS in 2013 for the actual breaking of the law.
That was in addition to $8.6M paid to Treasury. Difference in amount of fines is because the federal settlement alleged 97 transfers. When DFS got close enough to the bottom of the laundering scheme to negotiate a settlement, the bank was accused of 28,000 transfers worth $100B.
That is in addition to:
8/17 – Wall Street Journal – PwC to Settle With New York Regulator Over Consulting for Japanese Bank – PricewaterhouseCoopers is the outside consultant who allegedly modified their report on Bank of Tokyo’s money laundering scheme. PwC agreed to a $25M fine and two-year ban for one department providing consulting work.
And that is separate from a Deloitte unit paying a $10M fine in 2013 for their work on Standard Chartered’s money laundering.
11/18 – Wall Street Journal – BNP Officials Examined in Insider-Trading Probe – French officials are investigating senior staff of BNP Paribas over possible insider trading. Investigators are reportedly looking at $16M of stock sales by three most senior staff during 2013 when they may have knows about the scope of possible settlement for money laundering. Other staff are apparently under investigation as well, according to the article.
In 2014, the share price fell 15% as the market absorbed and adjusted for possible settlement. The problem would be if the senior staff knew there would be a huge settlement and knew that would affect the price of stock and then traded on that information.
I’ll try to monitor that investigation.
A few of my articles on BNP’s settlement:
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