BERN, Switzerland: Switzerland’s financial markets watchdog says it investigated 22 breaches of money laundering requirements last year, from nine in 2015, as the Alpine country seeks to combat the growing risk of corruption linked to assets from around the world.
The authority, FINMA, said Tuesday that “serious shortcomings” came to light in 2016, including major cases involving the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, and Brazilian oil company Petrobras. At year-end, FINMA had classified 21 unspecified banks as “high risk” — meaning their activities are under enhanced surveillance.
“Over the past four years, FINMA has taken enforcement action against supervised institutions in about 40 cases for breaches of anti-money laundering regulations, but the scale of the recent misconduct is unprecedented,” FINMA said in a statement with the release of its annual report.
“Several Swiss financial institutions have been caught up in major international corruption cases, not least those involving the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB and Brazilian oil company Petrobras,” it said.
Marc Branson, the FINMA chief executive, said the risk of money laundering in Switzerland — the world’s top hub for wealth management — has increased in the last couple of years as bank clients increasingly come from around the world and bring more assets from developing markets with uncertain origins.
“Therefore, the source of their wealth is harder to determine — and their transactions are perhaps harder to understand,” Branson told The Associated Press at a news conference in the Swiss capital. He said some banks had not strengthened their “control processes.”
“The warning signals were there, but were not acted on,” he said, alluding to cases of banks that violated the anti-money laundering requirements. “That’s where we step in and say: ‘That goes over the line — and that, we cannot accept.’“
FINMA has close three cases linked to banks with ties to 1MDB, involving Falcon Bank, Coutts and BSI, and is investigating four others. The only one of those four to be identified is linked to UBS, after Singaporean authorities announced their own probe of the Swiss banking heavyweight in October, authority spokesman Vinzenz Mathys said.
FINMA Chairman Thomas Bauer also said that the authority was not contacted by investigators behind a Dutch-led probe of suspected money laundering and tax evasion announced last week. He said judicial and tax authorities, not financial authorities, were in charge.
Swiss watchdog: Probes of money laundering jump in 2016
Swiss watchdog: Probes of money laundering jump in 2016
US military boards another oil tanker in Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean
- Venezuela has relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains
- The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil
WASHINGTON: US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Sunday.
Venezuela had faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.
Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast in the wake of the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The Defense Department said in a post on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”
“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.”
Video posted by the Pentagon shows US troops boarding the tanker.
The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.
“Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organization said.
Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told The Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.
The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under US control, and later told the AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond that post.
Last week, the US military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its ultimate fate was decided by the United States, according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decision-making.
