(Dec 3): A Swiss court threw out a 95 million Swiss franc ($131.3 million) penalty imposed on BSI Bank over its ties to the 1MDB scandal, calling the financial regulator’s calculation of the fine “incomprehensible.”
See: BSI in serious breach of money laundering regulations: FINMA
While BSI was responsible for “severe violations of supervisory provisions,” Finma’s methodology was flawed, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court said late Tuesday in a statement. The court referred the matter back to the regulator to reconsider the penalty.
“The confiscation has to correspond to the actual profit generated by the infringement,” the court said, but instead Finma chose to assess a 95-million franc penalty in return for not implementing a seizure in another case involving BSI in Brazil.
“It is not clear why, instead of performing exact calculations, Finma is making a kind of compensatory arrangement between two cases,” the court ruled.
BSI was hit with the Finma fine and Singapore’s financial regulator stripped the lender of its banking licence in 2016 over its ties to troubled 1MDB.
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US, Swiss and Singaporean prosecutors continue to investigate how billions of dollars was embezzled and laundered through the Malaysian development fund, some of it through Swiss banks. BSI had “ignored clear warning signals” about the risk of some of its transactions as it pursued higher-margin returns, Finma said in 2016.
BSI, which has since been bought by larger rival EFG International, appealed the penalty to the Swiss federal administrative court that same year, arguing that that Finma’s procedure leading to the decision was “flawed in many respects” and the decision was “disproportionate.”
Finma’s conclusion that the bank broke anti-money laundering rules “severely harmed the reputation of the bank and its employees,” BSI said.
A spokeswoman for EFG said she didn’t have any immediate comment, and an after-office hours email to Finma wasn’t immediately returned.
