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The US Treasury has fined UBS a record $125mn over its failure to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls despite being sanctioned for similar shortcomings in 2018.
UBS Financial Services, the Swiss bank’s US broker-dealer and wealth management subsidiary, failed to put in place an effective anti-money laundering programme and properly review foreign currency transactions worth more than $10bn, according to findings from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
FinCen said it was the largest penalty ever imposed against a broker-dealer for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. It labelled UBS a repeat offender after it received a $14.5mn fine in 2018 for similar conduct and made commitments to remediate its failings.
“Today’s historic action against UBSFS should send a clear message that recidivist financial institutions will face severe repercussions,” said FinCen director Andrea Gacki.
UBS admitted that it had “wilfully violated” the Bank Secrecy Act as part of its agreement with FinCen, including by failing to properly monitor certain transactions and properly conduct due diligence on high-risk customers.
The penalty includes fines from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
“In growing its business, UBSFS has sought out wealthy customers, some of whom present greater risk of money laundering and other illicit activities,” FinCen said.
“This includes ultra-high-net-worth customers who live in or derive their source of wealth from jurisdictions that present a heightened risk of illicit finance.”
The fines relate to UBS’s lax monitoring of clients and foreign currency transactions that took place between January 2019 and June 2023. FinCen found that UBS used a complex monitoring system that included an Excel spreadsheet in which errors led to hundreds of alerts being missed.
FinCen cited a number of examples, including a retired US client with ties to Russia who had been classified low risk despite publicly available information that he had done consulting work for an oligarch under US sanctions for years. UBS put through multiple large transfers before filing a suspicious activity report and ending the relationship.
UBS also permitted tens of millions of dollars in transactions, including third-party transfers that appeared to breach its own controls, for a Russian billionaire client “reported as one of the wealthiest individuals in the world” with ties to Vladimir Putin.
The bank opened accounts for the individual “without sufficient justification for taking on heightened money laundering risks and without adequate controls to mitigate those risks”, FinCen said.
The UBS financial adviser repeatedly “expressed their wish to proceed forward” with onboarding the Russian oligarch because he was “an existing client of a UBS affiliate with [assets under management] there of approximately $1.5bn and he has never been arrested or charged with any crimes”, FinCen found.
UBS said that the announcement by FinCen “brings closure to this legacy matter” and that the bank had “made significant investments to remediate and strengthen its [anti-money laundering] programme in line with leading industry practices”.
