Foreign News

TD Bank Hit With Record $3 Billion Fine Over Money Laundering

Image Credit: CNN

TD Bank will pay $3 billion to settle charges that it failed to properly monitor money laundering by drug cartels, regulators announced on Thursday, 10th of October, 2024.

According to CNN, the fine includes a $1.3 billion penalty that will be paid to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a record fine for a bank. TD also intends to pay $1.8 billion to the US Justice Department and plead guilty to resolve the US government’s investigation that the bank violated of the Bank Secrecy Act and allowed money laundering.

The US Department of Justice said in a statement that TD Bank had “long-term, pervasive, and systemic deficiencies” in its procedures of monitoring transactions. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news late Wednesday.

“By making its services convenient for criminals, it became one,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland, at a press conference Thursday.

More than 90% of transactions went unmonitored between January 2018 to April 2024, which “enabled three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts,” according to a legal filing.

“I want to be clear, these systemic failures did not just create hypothetical vulnerabilities, but they resulted in actual, material harm to American citizens and communities,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement. “Time and again, unlike its peers, TD Bank prioritized growth and profit over complying with the law. The bank enabled drug trafficking.”

In one instance, TD Bank employees collected more than $57,000 worth of gift cards to process more than $470 million in cash deposits from a money laundering network to “ensure employees would continue to process their transactions” and not declare them in required reports, the DoJ said.

In a related statement, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a US agency that regulates banks, said TD processed hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions the clearly indicated highly suspicious activity.

“This is a difficult chapter in our bank’s history,” TD Bank CEO Bharat Masrani in a statement. “These failures took place on my watch as CEO and I apologize to all our stakeholders.”

“We have taken full responsibility for the failures of our US [anti-money laundering] program and are making the investments, changes and enhancements required to deliver on our commitments,” Masrani added.


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