Ecuador’s financial regulators have launched a joint probe into possible money laundering at Banco Guayaquil, the country’s third-largest bank by net profit, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

As part of the investigation, the Superintendencia de Bancos has requested extensive details on financial transaction monitoring alerts and suspicious activity reports filed at Banco Guayaquil from 2021 through 2024, the news agency said. The review is linked to a corruption case that unfolded under the previous administration, José Julio Neira, the acting head of Ecuador’s anti-laundering unit UAFE, said Wednesday in a radio interview cited by Bloomberg.

“Individuals involved in the Encuentro Case not only held their bank accounts at that institution, but were also part” of former President Guillermo Lasso’s government, Neira said, according to Bloomberg. He accused the Lasso administration of failing to deploy available technology to combat money laundering, the news outlet reported.

The Encuentro Case—named after one of Lasso’s slogans—resulted in a 10-year prison sentence for Danilo Carrera, the former president’s brother-in-law, who was convicted in November 2024 of leading a group that manipulated contracts with state-owned companies, the news agency said.

Business associations issued statements in support of the bank. The nation’s Entrepreneurial Committee said “the regulation, oversight, and supervision of the financial system must be subject to due process and technical rigor,” according to the news outlet.

In April, Argentina’s Supreme Court approved the extradition of Hernán Luque, the former head of EMCO, an extinct holding company for state-owned enterprises. Luque is accused of involvement in Carrera’s graft network, which operated during the Lasso administration. Lasso, whose family-controlled holding company owns the majority of the publicly listed bank’s shares, said he himself had backed the extradition of his former associate to face local justice.