Standard Chartered faces £10m Treasury fine for ‘sanctions breaches’
Standard Chartered faces a fine of more than £10m by the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) for allegedly failing to prevent sanctions breaches.
The London-based bank, with a significant presence in the Far East and Asian markets, has been told by the Treasury organisation that it intends to impose the penalty in the coming weeks, Sky News reported.
The impending fine deals another blow to Winters, 57, whose outsized pension payments have caused a row with investors.
Winters exacerbated the dispute last month when he branded some shareholders “immature” for picking on his remuneration. Winters receives a cash allowance of £474,000, which is larger than for any other boss of a British bank.
The FTSE 100 bank has already been fined over £800m this year following US and UK probes into alleged breaches of sanctions against Iran. In April, the Financial Conduct Authority imposed a £102m fine on Standard Chartered for breaches in its UK wholesale bank correspondent banking business and its branches in the UAE.
When imposing the £102m fine, the City watchdog said the bank had opened an account with the equivalent of more than £500,000 in a suitcase in the Middle East “with little evidence that the origin of the funds had been investigated”.
It also said that Standard Chartered had neglected to gather information about a customer exporting a commercial product with potential military applications.
At that time, the FCA described the bank’s oversight of its financial crime controls as “narrow, slow and reactive”.
The series of breaches identified by the City watchdog were found to have occurred up until the end of 2014.
