The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) on Tuesday fined three banks, whose employees or sales agents stole money from clients, NT$20 million (US$722,335) in total, after it had warned that it would impose heavier fines on banks for such misconduct.
The commission fined CTBC Bank (中信銀行) NT$14 million, Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行) NT$4 million and Bank of Panhsin (板信銀行) NT$2 million, it said.
CTBC Bank was fined the most because the amount of money stolen by its sales agents — NT$230 million — was higher than the NT$2.49 million in the Bank SinoPac case and the Bank of Panhsin’s NT$4.3 million, Banking Bureau Chief Secretary Phil Tong (童政彰) said.
Photo: Kelson Wang, Taipei Times
CTBC Bank also failed to exercise anti-money laundering measures, providing its sales agents with the opportunity to steal money, Tong said.
CTBC Bank agents surnamed Kuan (管) and Yeh (葉) told their clients that they could help them invest in foreign fixed-income and investment-linked policies with returns of at least 5 percent, but as the products were only available to high-net-worth individuals, the clients could not buy the products directly, and had to transfer money to the agents first, Tong said.
The agents used several dummy accounts to receive money from clients and trade futures, Tong said.
Even though the dummy accounts shared the same contact information or e-mail addresses, which was a sign of money laundering, CTBC Bank failed to detect them, he said.
“This indicated that CTBC Bank has poor internal controls,” Tong said.
CTBC Bank apologized in a statement.
It has protected the rights of the customers involved and analyzed the loopholes that resulted in the malpractice, it said, pledging to improve its anti-money laundering and internal controls.
As for Bank SinoPac, the commission said an employee surnamed Chiang (江) used his own money to help clients pay insurance policy premiums and then stole NT$2.49 million from clients, an indication that the bank failed to exercise solid internal controls, the commission said.
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