Spain’s top criminal court on Thursday fined four former employees of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC, 中國工商銀行) 22.7 million euros (US$25.5 million) and handed them brief jail terms for laundering millions of euros for Chinese criminal groups.
The four included two senior executives of the Spanish branch of the partially state-owned ICBC.
As the jail terms were between three and five months, the four are unlikely to spend any time behind bars as first-time offenders in Spain are usually spared jail for sentences of under two years if convicted of a non-violent crime.
The investigation began in February 2016, when police arrested six bank officials on suspicion of letting traders move money earned through smuggling and tax fraud out of the country, without checking the origin of the funds as required by law.
According to the National Court, ICBC — which entered the Spanish market in January 2011 — set up a Madrid-based entity whose services were mainly used by Asian criminal groups, notably the Emperador-Cheqia and Snake organizations. It attracted 140 million euros in deposits, with Snake notably holding 70 accounts.
Bank staff, including its European director-general Liu Gang and two other employees, had “stubbornly disregarded” regulations against money laundering and were accepting cash deposits of any amount.
The court said Snake had paid 41.6 million euros in cash into the ICBC account between January 2011 and October 2012.
Staff had then helped by providing “a cover” for the movement of funds, through letting them split payments, use the bank’s anonymous in-house accounts and through the shared use of false ID documents, it said.
“The Spanish branch was an ideal instrument for massive money laundering operations in the service of criminal organizations,” the court said.
Although Snake had tried to move money through “many other banks” their anti-laundering mechanisms were alerted and the operations were blocked.
It said that from 2011 to 2016, ICBC’s Spain branch was the only entity that did not send a single report about suspect operations to the Spanish money-laundering watchdog SEPBLAC.
The court also flagged a “serious failure” on the part of the bank’s parent company, ICBC Luxembourg, saying it had failed in its obligation to ensure its subsidiaries were complying with regulations against money laundering.
It also imposed restrictions on ICBC Spain, barring it from receiving subsidies, state aid, financial incentives or benefits for two years to ensure it “can avoid being exploited in the future in a similar criminal situation.”
MOBILE SMART: The Dimensity 1200 is 22 percent better in terms of performance than its predecessor, and 25 percent more power-efficient, the handset chip designer said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday unveiled its premium 5G processors — the Dimensity 1200 and Dimensity 1100 — as it vies for a larger slice of the world’s rapidly growing 5G smartphone market. Manufactured using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (台積電) 6-nanometer process technology, the Dimensity 1200 processor performs 22 percent better than the previous generation Dimensity 1000+ processor, and is 25 percent more power-efficient, MediaTek said. Chinese smartphone brands Xiaomi Corp (小米) and Realme Mobile Telecommunications (Shenzhen) Co (銳爾覓移動通信) are to be the first adopters of the latest Dimensity chips, the companies said during a virtual media briefing. Xiaomi plans to equip its first
From India to China to the US, automakers cannot make vehicles — not that no one wants any, but because a more than US$450 billion industry for semiconductors got blindsided. How did both sides end up here? Over the past two weeks, automakers across the world have bemoaned the shortage of chips. Germany’s Audi, owned by Volkswagen AG, would delay making some of its high-end vehicles because of what chief executive officer Markus Duesmann called a “massive” shortfall in an interview with the Financial Times. The firm has furloughed more than 10,000 workers and reined in production. That is a further blow
‘BROAD RANGE’: The US Department of Commerce intends to deny a significant number of license requests for exports to Huawei, an industry association said US President Donald Trump’s administration notified Huawei Technologies Co (華為) suppliers, including chipmaker Intel Corp, that it is revoking certain licenses to sell to the Chinese company and intends to reject dozens of other applications to supply the telecommunications firm, people familiar with the matter told reporters. The action — likely the last against Huawei under Trump — is the latest in a long-running effort to weaken the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, which Washington sees as a national security threat. The notices came amid a flurry of US efforts against China in the final days of Trump’s administration. US president-elect Joe
AWARENESS NEEDED: The central bank urged lenders to know their customers before undertaking business for them and to seek funding in conventional ways The central bank yesterday said that it would take action against four foreign lenders for their involvement in helping companies trade in the deliverable forward market in contravention of foreign-exchange regulations. Some grain merchants newly based in Taiwan have since July 2019 been practicing questionable currency-trading activity, with the help of branches and subsidiaries of six foreign banks, the monetary policymaker told an unscheduled news conference. Affiliated firms as of July last year completed currency-related deals they referred to as trading that totaled US$11 billion, which was not in sync with their real business needs, the central bank said after wrapping up
RSS