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Grobank HSBC’s share price fell four percent to its lowest level in 25 years on Monday. Deutsche Bank shares lost a good two percent in Frankfurt’s first trading hours, while Standard Chartered shares fell about four percent. The reason for the landslide: the discovery of considerable flaws by major international banks in the fight against money laundering. The names of the Austrian banks were also mentioned in the documents.
A network of journalists from 88 countries had discovered from a US Treasury data breach that banks around the world had been doing business with high-risk clients for years. For the most part, there are over 2,100 suspicious transaction reports from large American banks to their reporting office, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is part of the US Treasury. Suspicious transaction reports date back to 2011 to 2017 and contain data on some 200,000 transfers that banks found strange, but often only years after they took place. Total amount of the transaction: $ 2 billion.
Some of the largest money houses in the world, including Deutsche Bank, would have done business with dubious clients after they had already admitted inadequate preventive measures in the US or been penalized for not laundering money. On the part of Deutsche Bank, it is said that the suspected cases were nothing new and that they were reported to the supervisory authorities.
Suspicious transactions
FinCEN’s files also document 804 transactions worth a billion dollars with Austrian banks. The focus is on the corruption scandal surrounding the Brazilian group Odebrecht. He had handled huge bribe payments through several offshore companies, which had accounts at Meinl Bank Antigua. And which in turn processed payments through several correspondent banks, one of which was the former Meinl Bank in Vienna ($ 64 million in 134 suspicious transactions). To this end, Raiffeisen Bank International is said to have transacted $ 54 million in 102 payments between the end of 2013 and 2015. An ON spokesperson: “Payments reported by US banks also triggered an alarm in our systems money laundering. As a result, we stopped those payments and finally ended the business relationship with the account holder. ” That doesn’t change the fact that domestic banks have been under pressure with FinCEN files: BAWAG posted the biggest losses on the Vienna Stock Exchange with minus 6.02 percent, Erste Group lost 4.69 percent, RBI 2.98 percent (as of yesterday afternoon).
Internationally, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated in 2018 that the money laundering industry washes up to two trillion US dollars a year. That is between two and five percent of world GDP. “At the moment, the main difficulties lie in cross-border cooperation. It is already possible within Europe. But these transactions come from outside Europe or come out of Europe,” says Klaus Grubelnik, spokesman for the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA ).
