[ad_1]
Dominico Zapata / Things
ASB Bank received seven transactions worth about $ 1.7 million that were flagged as potentially suspicious, documents show.
New Zealand banks have been named in a massive international money laundering investigation for their role in processing transactions worth US $ 1.8 million (NZ $ 2.7 million) marked as suspicious, according to the data compiled from leaked documents.
The documents, obtained by Buzzfeed and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), include information on more than $ 2 trillion in transactions dated 1999-2017 that banks had identified as suspicious.
ASB and BNZ appear on an ICIJ data map that contains information on more than US $ 35 billion in transactions dated 2000 to 2017, which were reported as suspicious to the United States Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known like FinCEN.
ICIJ said FinCEN files revealed the banks’ role in industrial-scale money laundering, and the bloodshed and suffering that flowed from it.
READ MORE:
* BNZ made a payment for Iran’s ‘oil’ in breach of its own sanctions policy
* BNZ fought to comply with anti-money laundering laws
ASB received seven transactions worth approximately US $ 1.7 million from ANZ and China Merchants Bank that were deemed suspicious, according to the ICIJ.
The transactions were conducted through The Bank of New York Mellon Corp, an American multinational investment bank in New York City, which then submitted suspicious activity reports to FinCEN regarding the transactions, the data shows.
BNZ sent four transactions worth $ 78,000 to Taiwan’s E Sun Bank, through British multinational bank Standard Chartered Plc, according to the ICIJ.
Chris McKeen / Stuff
The BNZ transactions were sent to a Taiwanese bank through a British multinational company.
Standard Chartered Plc submitted a suspicious activity report to FinCEN, the data shows.
The data on the map only included cases where sufficient details about both the originating bank and the beneficiary were available on file with FinCEN.
The logs include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by compliance officers at nearly 90 financial institutions. Each report provided a summary of the total amount in suspicious transactions and the time range in which they occurred, but did not always include complete details about each transaction, ICIJ said.
Stuff he was not included in the consortium and he has not seen the leaked documents.
ICIJ said that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank AG, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon “continued to benefit from powerful and dangerous players” over the past two decades, even after the United States imposed sanctions on financial institutions.
JPMorgan, the largest US-based bank, moved money for individuals and companies linked to the “looting” of public money in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, ICIJ said.
“Although it is a large amount, the $ 2 trillion in suspicious transactions identified within this set of documents is just one drop in a much larger avalanche of dirty money flowing through banks around the world,” ICIJ said.
ICIJ said it was publishing some of the data in the public interest.
“While the transactions do not necessarily establish any criminal conduct or other irregularities, the data provides an unprecedented overview of how money, flagged as suspicious and, in some cases, linked to corruption, fraud, penalty evasion or other crimes, it flows around the world through correspondent banking networks, ”he said.
Compliance staff at large banks often filed suspicious activity reports only after a transaction or customer became the subject of a negative news report or a government investigation, when funds had long been depleted, the ICIJ said, citing the documents.
ASB, BNZ and New Zealand’s anti-money laundering supervisor, the Reserve Bank, were contacted for comment.
