Wells Fargo fined $97 million for non-compliance with US sanctions

Wells Fargo fined $97 million for non-compliance with US sanctions on Iran, Syria and Sudan

US federal authorities said on Thursday that Wells Fargo & Co. will pay fines of about $97.8 million for not imposing sufficient oversight over possible non-compliance with US sanctions imposed on Iran, Syria and Sudan that led to their violation.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said that the bank’s weak oversight made it violate US sanctions by providing a trade financing platform to a foreign bank, which it used in blocked transactions worth $532 million.

The Federal Reserve fined Wells Fargo $67.8 million, and OFAC fined the bank $30 million for insufficient oversight of potential noncompliance between 2010 and 2015.

“Wells Fargo is pleased to have resolved this legacy issue involving behavior that ended in 2015, which we voluntarily brought to the attention of and fully cooperated with OFAC and the Federal Reserve to address,” a Wells Fargo spokesperson said in a statement.

OFAC said in a statement that Wells Fargo and the former Wachovia Bank provided a European bank with application software beginning in 2008 that allowed the company to process 124 transactions for sanctioned individuals or countries.

The American bank is not new to fines, as it had reached last December an agreement with the regulators in America to bear the amount of $ 3.7 billion, to stop accusations of causing harm to more than 16 million consumers.

The settlement included a $1.7 billion fine, as well as more than $2 billion in damages to some of his clients.

Although the settlement reached at the time, despite its magnitude, lifted the burden from the bank’s shoulders, after more than two years of pressure it suffered from regulators and customers alike, the bank remained under the restrictions imposed on it by the Federal Reserve, to put an end to the increase in the size of the bank. His assets, which were imposed on him after the false accounts scandal in 2016, cost him in 2020 fines amounting to $ 3 billion.

(Archyde.com, The New Arab)

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