Deutsche Bank has gotten into a lot of trouble over the years for a lot of things, but mostly for money laundering and all that goes into it, especially not being very good at detecting money laundering. But it’s not the only Teutonic financial institution with an uncanny ability to look the other way when cash needs washing.
The Financial Conduct Authority has handed German lender Commerzbank’s London branch a £37,805,400 fine for failing to enforce proper anti-money laundering controls…. The fine relates to a five year period from October 2012 to September 2017, during which the FCA published guidance on how firms could step up their efforts to tackle money laundering.
Of course, being bad at something—anti-money laundering—does not mean you are good at the thing you bad at catching, and Commerzbank assures us it was not.
A Commerzbank spokesperson said it had cooperated fully with the FCA and that the regulator “found no actual financial crime”.
These two were a better match than we thought.
Watchdog slaps Commerzbank with £38m fine over money laundering failures [FN]