Oversight

CaixaBank has been hit with several fines totaling more than €30 million by Spain’s anti-money laundering watchdog, Sepblac, over a legacy real-estate transaction.

India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) has rolled out stricter identity verification requirements for cryptocurrency exchanges, aiming to curb money laundering and terrorist financing, CoinDesk reported, citing Press Trust of India.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday launched a set of initiatives to investigate what it called “rampant government benefits fraud” in Minnesota, including the imposition of new reporting requirements for financial institutions. 

Luxembourg’s financial regulator has fined Rakuten Europe Bank €185,000 for multiple breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) regulations, according to a new report by the Luxembourg Times.

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an order directing the federal government to loosen marijuana regulations and accelerate a long-stalled effort to reclassify the drug, a step that could mark one of the biggest federal shifts on cannabis policy in decades, Reuters reported.

Australian regulators took coordinated action on Thursday to address weaknesses in the anti-money laundering and risk-management controls of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, including the imposition of a A$50 million operational-risk capital charge. 

The U.S. regulator of national banks scaled back some of the compliance obligations it had imposed on Citigroup under a 2020 enforcement action that penalized the lender for inadequate risk controls and data-management practices, the Financial Times reported.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) has filed civil proceedings in the High Court against ASB Bank, alleging breaches of core requirements under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Act dating from at least December 2019. 

Nationwide Building Society has been hit with a £44-million fine by the UK’s financial regulator over longstanding weaknesses in its systems to detect and prevent financial crime, including failures that allowed tens of millions of pounds in fraudulent Covid furlough payments to pass through a customer’s account.

The Trump administration is moving to give the U.S. Treasury Department’s financial intelligence unit a decisive say over how banks are punished for anti–money-laundering (AML) failures, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal.