NZ banks in massive crime investigation

Banks in New Zealand are named in a massive international money laundering investigation for their role in processing US$1.8 million (NZ$2.7 million) worth of transactions flagged as suspicious, data compiled from leaked documents show.

The documents, obtained by BuzzFeed and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), include information on more than US$2 trillion in transactions dated from 1999 to 2017 that had been flagged by banks as suspicious.

ASB and Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) both feature in an ICIJ data map containing information on more than US$35 billion in transactions dated from 2000 to 2017 that were reported as suspicious to the United States Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN.

ASB received seven transactions worth about US$1.7m from ANZ and China Merchants Bank that were deemed suspicious, according to the ICIJ. The transactions came via the Bank of New York Mellon Corp, a US-based multinational investment bank, which then filed suspicious activity reports with FinCEN.

BNZ sent four transactions worth US$78,000 to Taiwan’s E Sun Bank, via British multinational bank Standard Chartered Plc, according to the ICIJ.

A suspicious activity report was filed to FinCEN by Standard Chartered Plc, the data shows.

The data in the map only included cases where sufficient details about both the originator and beneficiary banks were available in the FinCEN Files.

The records include more than 2100 suspicious activity reports filed by compliance officers at nearly 90 financial institutions.

The ICIJ said JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank AG, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon ‘‘kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players’’ over the past two decades even after the US imposed penalties on the financial institutions.

The ICIJ said it was publishing a portion of the data in the public interest. ‘‘While the transactions do not necessarily establish any criminal misconduct or other wrongdoing, the data offers an unprecedented overview of how money – flagged as suspicious, and in some cases linked to corruption, fraud, sanctions evasion or other crimes – flows around the globe via networks of correspondent banks.’’

Compliance staff at big banks often filed suspicious activity reports only after a transaction or customer became the subject of a negative news report or a government probe, when the funds were long gone, the ICIJ said.