Rabobank`s guilty plea comes less than two months after a former rabobank vice president, George Martin, struck a deferred prosecution agreement with the United States for his role in supporting and promoting Rabobank`s failure to maintain an anti-money laundering program that meets BSA requirements. Martin admitted his conduct in federal court in San Diego on December 14, 2017. As part of its guilty plea, Rabobank agreed to cooperate with the ongoing U.S. investigation. Coinciding with the Justice Department`s announcement of Rabobank`s guilty plea, the OCC announced the imposition of its own $50 million civil fine on Rabobank for failing the BSA/AML program and withholding documents from auditors. While the Department of Justice and banking regulators have simultaneously conducted parallel investigations in recent years, it has become common to credit the lowest penalty on the larger ones, eliminating the “stacking” of penalties by several regulators. Currency that Mexican banks were able to accept – a development that was followed by a large influx of new accounts and cash deposits at Rabobank branches on the U.S. side of the border. [7] Despite this activity and the alerts generated by Rabobank`s transaction monitoring system, Rabobank implemented policies and procedures during this period that “excluded and removed” the investigation and reporting of suspicious activity. [8] These include: The BSA requires financial institutions to implement and maintain an appropriately designed anti-money laundering compliance program, including: (i) detecting suspicious activities that indicate money laundering and other criminal offences, and (ii) ensuring and monitoring compliance with BSA`s record-keeping and reporting obligations, including reporting suspicious transactions to the U.S. Treasury Department (by filing a case) “Suspicious Reports” or “SAR”), which seek a possible violation of the law. In its agreement, Rabobank admitted to knowing that its BSA/AML program had failed significantly between 2009 and 2012.

Some of these BSA/AML bugs resulted from Rabobank`s policies and procedures investigating suspicious transactions in its branches, by its account holders, or by individuals conducting transactions on behalf of their account holders who had various indications of being involved, derived from, or promoting illegal, excluded, and removed behavior. [3] See Rabobank NA pleads guilty, agrees to raise more than $360 million | | of the PAO Ministry of Justice, available at www.justice.gov/opa/pr/rabobank-na-pleads-guilty-agrees-pay-over-360-million. When the OCC began its regular audit of Rabobank in 2012, Rabobank, through three of its officers, agreed, among other things, to knowingly obstruct the OCC`s audit. Rabobank responded to occ`s first investigation report of February 2013 with false and misleading information about the status of Rabobank`s BSA/AML program. Rabobank also made false and misleading statements to the OCC about the existence of reports prepared by an external consultant detailing the shortcomings and ineffectiveness of Rabobank`s BSA/AML program. By using this website, you agree to security monitoring and auditing. For security reasons and to ensure that the public service remains accessible to users, this government computer system uses network traffic monitoring programs to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or modify information, or otherwise cause damage, including attempts to deny service to users. While Rabobank`s resolution contains somewhat unique facts — particularly allegations that Rabobank deceived its regulator and undermined its own compliance staff — the resolution has several parallels with other recent BSA/AML resolutions that financial institutions wish to consider when evaluating their BSA/AML compliance programs.

Acting Deputy Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Department of Justice`s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney General Adam L. Braverman for the Southern District of California, Special Representative Dave Shaw of the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Investigations (HSI) in San Diego, and Special Representative R. Damon Rowe of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) announced the announcement. To ensure that our website works well for all users, the SEC monitors the frequency of requests for content SEC.gov to ensure that automated searches do not interfere with other people`s ability to access SEC.gov content. We reserve the right to block IP addresses that make excessive requests.

Current policies limit users to a total of no more than 10 requests per second, regardless of the number of computers used to send requests. In order to further obscure the inadequacy of its BSA/AML program and to prevent “others from contradicting our findings” and our statements to the OCC, Rabobank demoted or fired two RNA employees who raised questions about the relevance of Rabobank`s BSA/AML program. “It is the responsibility of homeland security investigations to monitor and investigate activities that exploit global infrastructure, including financial systems,” said Special Agent in charge of Shaw. “This complex investigation revealed, and Rabobank admits that Rabobank was aware of the tail risk of processing hundreds of millions of dollars related to transnational crime and international money laundering – activities that plague the southwest border. This significant advocacy and confiscation sends a strong message to financial institutions that this activity will not be tolerated. Note that this policy may change if the SEC manages to SEC.gov to ensure that the site operates efficiently and remains available to all users. “Rabobank was required to shed light on suspected drug traffickers, money launderers and organized crime,” U.S. Attorney Braverman said. Instead, this bank deliberately paid hundreds of millions of dollars in suspicious cash transactions and remittances through its branches and took steps to hide this activity from regulators.

We will vigorously protect the integrity of the banking system and will not allow financial institutions in our communities to play a role in facilitating international money laundering or financing transnational criminal organizations. In addition, Rabobank admitted that it failed to monitor these transactions, conducted proper investigations and referred the SARs to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as required by the BSA. .