The UK division of one of India’s largest public sector banks, Canara, has been fined £896,100 (€1 million) and barred from accepting new client deposits for five months for failures in its anti-money-laundering controls.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s markets regulator, said that the breaches affected almost all levels of its business and governance structure, including senior management.
In a statement, the FCA said that between November 2012 and January 2016, Canara had failed to maintain adequate anti-money-laundering systems and to remedy identified weaknesses, despite having been notified of shortcomings in its systems and controls.
The FCA said that it had assessed Canara’s misconduct, which risked undermining the integrity of the UK financial system, at level four out of five on the regulator’s scale of seriousness.
Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: “Canara was warned its money laundering controls were inadequate and so its failure to remediate them properly is at the more serious end of the range of sanctions.”
By co-operating with the investigation Canara qualified for a 30% discount on the fine. The FCA added that it was satisfied that “the firm’s substantive anti-money-laundering deficiencies have now have been rectified”.
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