UBS, Credit Suisse, Julius Bär fined in Singapore

UBS, Credit Suisse, Julius Bär and LGT fined in Singapore Keystone-SDA

Singapore's financial market regulator has fined nine banks for violating anti-money laundering regulations, including UBS, Credit Suisse and Julius Bär of Switzerland and Liechtenstein's LGT.

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The sum of the fines for these four banks totals S$12.2 million (SGD), or CHF7.6 million, according to information provided by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today. For the nine institutions combined, the total stands at SGD27.45 million (CHF17.1 million).

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In detail, the Singapore branch of Credit Suisse (CS) – a bank that has since been acquired by UBS – was fined the highest amount of S$5.8 million (CHF3.6 million). The UBS branch in the city-state was hit with a fine of S$3 million (CHF1.9 million), compared to S$2.4 million (CHF1.5 million) for the Singapore office of the Zurich bank Julius Bär, and S$1 million (CHF623,000) for the LGT bank.

The fine takes into account various factors, including the number of violations and the degree of weakness of controls, the Singapore market regulator announced.

In particular, Credit Suisse and Julius Bär are accused of failing to have adequate procedures in place to assess the risk of money laundering at certain clients and of failing to conduct timely reviews of transactions identified as suspicious by internal supervisors. The latter allegation was also made against UBS and LGT.

The nine banks concerned failed to detect or sufficiently follow up on the warning signs detected in the information and documents provided by clients, or even failed to check the accuracy of this data.

The facts reprimanded to the banks date from the beginning of 2023 to the first months of this year. UBS took over Credit Suisse in March 2023.

Translated from Italian by DeepL/mga

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