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OCC fines Citibank US$70 million for failure to comply with AML consent order

Chris Hamblin

9 January 2018

The order for the penalty was signed last month but released to the public in the last few days. The bank neither admits nor denies the findings. The OCC, for its part, is silent about the ways in which the bank has failed to observe the previous order, preferring merely to state - in a distinctly unlettered fashion - that the bank "has not timely achieved compliance" with it.

An OCC examination (regulatory visit) in 2012 found that the bank's efforts to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act 1970 were lacking and that it had also contravened 12 CFR § 21.11 (Suspicious Activity Report Filings); and 31 USC § 5318(i) and its implementing regulation, 31 CFR § 1010.610 (Correspondent Banking). The CFR is the US Code of Federal Regulations and the USC is the US code of both civil and criminal laws.

The 'customer due diligence process' for which the order of 2012 calls is comprehensive and the bank may or may not have failed to observe it. It obliges the bank to do the following.