“Suspicious Minds” or Suspicious Transactions

Elvis Presley sang the song “Suspicious Minds” in 1968. “We’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out...”.  The Straits Times, Singapore reported on September 21, 2020, a number of banks in Singapore handled about US$4.5 billion (S$6.13 billion) in suspicious transactions between 2000 and 2017. Those mentioned included DBS Bank, CIMB Bank and Deutsche Bank among those that processed the largest sums of such funds here.

The findings were from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on leaked files, comprising so-called suspicious activity reports, from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the United States.

The consortium noted that, within almost 20 years, Singapore received about US$3 billion and sent US$1.5 billion in 1,781 suspicious transactions. In all, the ICIJ reported on Sunday (Sept 20) that the files contained information about more than US$2 trillion worth of transactions between 1999 and 2017, which were flagged by internal compliance departments of financial institutions as suspicious.

Experts told The Straits Times that filing suspicious activity reports do not translate to wrongdoing. Furthermore, banks and financial institutions are obliged to flag unusual transactions so that regulators can follow up on them, they added. For example, an account which typically sees small transactions getting an unusually large deposit of money might pop up on banks' radars, the noted. Alternatively, if bank customer who has $1 million in his account decides to transfer all his money to another bank - such a transaction might also show up as "suspicious".

The consortium released a list of banks in Singapore involved in the allegedly illicit transfers, based on more than 2,100 reports amounting to some $35 billion, that were filed by about 90 financial institutions.

The list "displays cases where sufficient details about both the originator and beneficiary banks were available, and is designed to illustrate how potentially dirty money flows from country to country around the world, via US-based banks", said the ICIJ. The consortium reported that five global banks appeared most often in the leaked documents - HSBC Bank, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered and Bank of New York Mellon.

In Singapore, DBS Bank was listed as having sent US$596.8 million and received US$228.3 million in 461 suspicious transactions between 2000 and 2017. CIMB Bank was noted to have sent US$250.4 million and received US$34.3 million in 294 suspicious transactions, while Deutsche Bank sent US$224.3 million and received US$62 million in 19 suspicious transactions within the same period.

How respectable have banks become? Or, is it societies that have become lax on what is right?

 

Source: The Straits Times

Reference:

FinCEN leaks: DBS, CIMB and Deutsche among banks in S'pore that handled about $6 billion in suspicious transaction, Aw Cheng Wei, The StraitsTimes, September 21, 2020