Category: Financial Services

The UK’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation has issued a Penalty Notice against Citibank NA in the amount of £4,732,830.58.

This is OFSI’s second largest fine since it was launched.

The fine relates to 970 payments in breach of the UK’s Russian sanctions with a total value of £19,720,127.32 with most of the payments taking place in the months after February 2022.

OFSI have Citibank a 20% voluntary self-disclosure and cooperation credit (and not the permissible 30%). The bank had voluntarily self-reported many of the breaches and payments, but was unaware of £6.9m of the payments being breaches until OFSI started to raise questions.

OFSI also provided Citibank with a 20% discount based on agreeing a settlement, under OFSI’s fairly new settlement methodology.

These discounts, against a starting point where the maximum fine is 50% of the value of the breaches, resulted in the penalty amount. It is worth noting that the new Chancellor has announced plans to increase the maximum fine to 100% of the value of the transfer.

The breaches all related to failings and delay in screening customers, recipients and correspondent banks. While OFSI’s Notice expresses sympathy with the high volume of designations that took place in 2022, it was critical of Citibank’s level of preparedness in the run up to February 2022 and of the high volume of errors including changes in policy that made the prevention of payments more difficult. OFSI also was critical of the time taken for the bank to report that it was holding frozen assets.

The UK’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation has issued a Penalty Notice against the London branch of Deutsche Bank AG fining it £165,000.

The fine related to two payments made in June 2022 and July 2022 that had been voluntarily reported to OFSI in September 2022. The “pace” of resolving this matter is in keeping with previous cases from OFSI.

The first payment leading to the fine was of £356,429.27 processed on 29 June 2022 in favour of a company called Okko LLC. Earlier that same day the UK had designated the 100% shareholder of Okko, JSC New Opportunities.

The second payment of £279,189.48 was made a month later.

OFSO took the view (particularly in light of the second payment) that even though there had been a limited window to stop the first payment, nonetheless there was such a window. The screening methods used by Deutsche Bank failed to identify that a newly-designated entity wholly-owned the intended transferee. This failing continued for the next month and was not purely a function of the short window for the first payment.

OFSI also took the view that the breaches could only be seen as such after the UK adopted a strict liability rule for the civil enforcement of sanctions breaches on 15 June 2022. An additional payment made before this date, was not considered a “breach” for this reason.

The notice was resolved under OFSI’s new settlement regime, and involved a 45% discount on what would otherwise have been a £300,000 fine based on the self-disclosure and Deutsche Bank agreeing to settle.