SINGAPORE, July 4 — Singapore’s central bank said today it has penalised several top global financial institutions, including Citibank and Swiss lender UBS, for breaches linked to the island-state’s biggest money laundering case.
Ten people hailing from China’s Fujian province but bearing different non-Chinese passports had been convicted and jailed in Singapore in the SG$3.0 billion (RM$9.94 billion) case, which is also reportedly among the biggest money-laundering cases in the world.
They used Singapore’s financial system to launder illicit proceeds from multi-country gambling, according to the police.
Following their arrests in 2023, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched extensive “supervisory examinations” into financial institutions “with nexus to persons of interest” in the case.
Today the MAS said it had completed its probe and imposed penalties totalling SG$27.45 million on nine financial institutions for breaches in anti-money laundering safeguards.
Among those penalised were Credit Suisse Singapore Branch for SG$5.8 million, local lender United Overseas Bank (UOB) for SG$5.6 million, the Singapore branch of UBS AG for SG$3.0 million and Citibank N.A. Singapore and Citibank Singapore Ltd for SG$2.6 million.
The Singapore branch of Switzerland’s Bank Julius Baer was also penalised SG$2.4 million, while three more financial institutions rounded up the rest of the penalties.
Credit Suisse collapsed in March 2023, prompting its acquisition by rival UBS.
“The breaches arose out of poor or inconsistent implementation of these (anti-money laundering) policies and controls,” the MAS said in a statement.
The shortcomings included inadequate customer risk assessment and failure to detect or follow up on certain “red flags” detected in documents that should have cast doubt on some of their clients’ sources of wealth, according to the MAS.
Eight of the institutions “failed to adequately review relevant transactions flagged as suspicious by their own systems”, the regulator added.
“The relevant transactions were unusually large, inconsistent with the customers’ profiles or showed unusual patterns.”
The MAS also banned four people from doing any business in the industry for between three and six years, and issued reprimands to five more people as part of the actions it had taken.
Local bank UOB said in a statement “we acknowledge and accept MAS’ findings with regard to the identified areas for improvement”, adding that over the past two years, it had implemented measures to address deficiencies. — AFP
