October 10, (THEWILL) – The United States Government has fined a Canadian financial institution, TD Bank, over $3 billion in settle charges that it failed to properly monitor money laundering by drug cartels.
The fine includes a $1.3 billion penalty that will be paid to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). This is in addition to $1.8 billion to paid to the US Justice Department (DoJ) following a guilty plea that it violated Bank Secrecy Act and allowed money laundering.
A statement by DoJ said TD Bank had “long-term, pervasive, and systemic deficiencies” in its procedures of monitoring transactions.
According to court documents, more than 90% of transactions went unmonitored between January 2018 to April 2024, which “enabled three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts.
In one instance, the DoJ said, TD Bank employees collected more than $57,000 worth of gift cards to process more than $470 million in cash deposits from a money laundering network to “ensure employees would continue to process their transactions” and not declare them in required reports.
On its part, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a US agency that regulates banks, said TD processed hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions that clearly indicated highly suspicious activity.
The bank will be subject to four years of monitoring by FinCEN to observe the lender more closely and ensure it is following the agreement.
“The vast majority of financial institutions have partnered with FinCEN to protect the integrity of the US financial system. TD Bank did the opposite. From fentanyl and narcotics trafficking, to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank’s chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system”, Wally Adeyemo, US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury said in a statement.
The US Federal Reserve also fined TD Bank and will force the company to relocate to the United States its anti-money laundering compliance office.
And, in a significant part of the agreement, the OCC is restricting TD Bank’s growth in the United States.
