The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday fined Citibank Taiwan Ltd (花旗台灣) NT$10 million (US$357,194) and DBS Bank Taiwan (星展台灣) NT$6 million for breaches of the nation’s anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.
The NT$10 million fine is the highest penalty that it has imposed on a domestic bank, the commission said.
Citibank Taiwan failed to set up a sound mechanism for evaluating clients’ risk of money laundering and for detecting suspicious transactions, Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Huang Kuang-hsi (黃光熙) told a news conference in New Taipei City.
Photo: Kelson Wang, Taipei Times
The bank based its AML policies on those of its US-based parent company, Citigroup Inc, but the policies ignored transaction types specific to Taiwan that are suspected to be used for money laundering, Huang added.
As criminals in Taiwan mainly move money from Taiwan to China, Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asian countries, Citibank Taiwan should have highlighted these countries in its system, but it had not highlighted them because its parent company had not, Huang said.
Many of the bank’s corporate clients were one-person overseas companies that shared the same billing address and contact number, which was questionable, the commission said, adding that they might have been tax reduction arrangements for people related to each other.
Citibank Taiwan should have known the backgrounds of the one-person companies, but it did not — it had only labeled them as low or medium-risk clients, the commission said.
The bank’s mechanism for monitoring transactions was designed to exclude large deals, as it found it normal for big clients to have large transactions, but that goes against AML principles, which say that the larger the deal, the more scrutiny is needed, it said.
Once it detected suspicious deals, the bank did not investigate them well, as it ignored incidents when the scale of a client’s business did not match transaction amounts, failed to clarify the sources of funds and disregarded that sanctioned countries have higher risks, the commission said.
Citibank Taiwan also failed to set up a system to specifically monitor clients that were cryptocurrency exchanges, also a breach of AML regulations, it added.
DBS Bank Taiwan was penalized for similar breaches, the commission said.
DBS Bank Taiwan also had many clients that were one-person companies that shared billing addresses and contact numbers, and even though the bank had labeled them as high-risk clients, it did not take further measures to prevent potential money laundering, it said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”