Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (BTMU) has been slapped with a penalty of $315m by New York’s banking regulator for misleading regulators regarding a probe of the bank’s transactions with countries subject to US sanctions.
Tetsuro Anan, the bank’s compliance manager, has resigned following the probe, while two other employees have been banned from working with any bank in New York.
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The lender reportedly pressured its outside consultant, PricewaterhouseCoopers’s (PWC) Regulatory Advisory Services division, into watering down a report related to transactions involving sanctioned countries.
The latest penalty is in addition to the fine of $250m imposed on BTMU in June last year as part of a previous agreement with New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) over sanctions’ violations.
The report was the basis of the settlement reached by BTMU for stripping information from wires that would have enabled authorities monitor transactions across Iran, Burma and Myanmar from 2002 to 2007.
The bank allegedly misled the department in reaching the settlement, by deleting significant information from an objective report.
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By GlobalDataPWC discovered that the bank had been telling employees to delete information from messages that would have triggered compliance alerts, and highlighted the importance of the discovery in an earlier draft.
However, investigations revealed that PWC later replaced that section at the bank’s request.
