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Following a regular money laundering inspection at DNB in February this year, Finanstilsynet announced that it is opening for an infringement fee that can amount to NOK 400 million for DNB.
In that case, it will be by far the highest fine any Norwegian bank has ever been fined for violating money laundering rules.
“DNB has not been involved in money laundering, but Finanstilsynet is criticizing the inadequate enforcement of the Money Laundering Act,” DNB wrote in a statement Monday morning.
The case has not been completed by Finanstilsynet. Notification of the fine appears in a preliminary report from the Authority, and the issue of the fine and the amount of the fine has yet to be clarified. DNB writes that they will now respond to Finanstilsynet’s preliminary report.
The reported fee does not apply to suspected money laundering or complicity in money laundering, but rather to inadequate compliance with anti-money laundering regulations, a comprehensive set of rules that requires banks to maintain a good overview of customers and cash flows.
In parallel, DNB is being investigated in the Samherji case. DNB is under investigation after the bank is said to have been used to funnel more than NOK 600 million from Icelandic fishing company Samherji to offshore accounts. Investigations in several countries are working to find out how much of the money is linked to possible bribery for fishing quotas in Namibia.
The investigation was recently transferred from Økokrim to the Attorney General, after Økokrim’s boss, Pål Lønseth, declared himself incompetent in the investigation.
Corporate clients
Finanstilsynet has carried out a series of inspections of Norway’s largest bank in recent years and has criticized the bank in several rounds. It is mainly the bank’s corporate client departments, not private clients, that have been criticized.
Finanstilsynet, among other things, has found indications of underreporting of suspicious matters, that DNB has refrained from sending notifications of suspicious matters to Økokrim in cases where they should have done so.
Among the findings that Finanstilsynet has made previously are the following:
- DNB’s department for the bank’s most prosperous private clients, Banca Privada, appears to “lack sufficient prioritization and knowledge” of how the department should ensure it complies with anti-money laundering rules.
- The bank has spent an illegal amount of time processing and investigating alarm messages from the bank’s electronic systems. Finanstilsynet believes that the processing time the bank had when Finanstilsynet inspected was so long that it did not comply with the rules of the Money Laundering Act.
- Ecocrime has received a “very low number” of suspicious transaction reports from DNB’s Private Banking and Hav departments. The fact that DNB has sent few reports indicates that DNB has failed to identify and investigate possible money laundering, the Authority believes and believes that the low number of reports may be “indications of underreporting of suspicious circumstances”.
What Finanstilsynet now emphasizes in its criticism of DNB is not yet known. (Terms)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and / or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases via a link, which leads directly to our pages. Copying or other use of all or part of the content may only be made with written permission or as permitted by law. For more terms, see here.
