Commonwealth Bank accused of money laundering
Foreign criminals were able to launder millions of dollars through Australia because the Commonwealth Bank of Australia allegedly failed to comply with strict money laundering and counter terrorism finance laws.
The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) filed a motion in the Federal Court to prosecute CommBank alleging 53,700 contraventions of the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism laws since 2012.
According to the statement, part of the breaching of the laws stemmed from CommBank’s introduction of Intelligent Deposit Machines, similar to ATMs, but also accepting cash and cheque deposits.
By June last year, $1 billion a month was being deposited via the machines.
AUSTRAC has said these machines were being used by criminals wanting to move money from their drug manufacturing and trafficking sales offshore and domestically. It is understood some of the money laundering syndicates have been linked to known criminal figures, including Outlaw Motorcycle groups.
In one instance, between November 2014 and August 2015, cash deposits amassing to $27.2 million were made to one account and almost immediately transferred offshore.
“The deposits were the proceeds of a drug manufacture and importation syndicate,” the filed motion states.
“Three individuals have been charged with dealing with proceeds of crime, with one of these individuals already having been convicted.”
In another case, CommBank allegedly identified repeated suspected structured cash deposits to 16 accounts, 15 of them attached to fake names, that were moving cash to China.
“Notwithstanding this suspicion, between April and 1 July 1 2015, CommBank permitted approximately $9.1 million to be transferred from these accounts to Hong Kong.”
The Australian Federal Police has since found the accounts were opened by foreign nationals on holiday visas with the intention of making bulk cash deposits in Australia to launder tens of millions of dollars back overseas.
Until late January, the abuse of Intelligent Deposit Machines continued with CommBank accepting $320,000 cash deposits over five days into one account.
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AUSTRAC acting CEO Peter Clark said for a period of three years, CommBank did not comply with the requirements of its Anti-Money Laundering/Counter-Terrorism Finance program by failing to monitor transactions on 778,370 accounts.
“AUSTRAC alleges that the bank failed to report suspicious matters either on time or at all involving transactions totalling over $77 million,” he said.
“Even after CBA became aware of suspected money laundering or structuring on CBA accounts, it did not monitor its customers to mitigate and manage ... risk.”
CommBank has released a statement acknowledging the civil proceedings that had been brought by AUSTRAC.
“We have been in discussions with AUSTRAC for an extended period and have co-operated fully with their requests,” it said.
“We take our regulatory obligations extremely seriously and we are one of the largest reporters to AUSTRAC. On an annual basis we report over four million transactions to AUSTRAC in an effort to identify and combat any suspicious activity as quickly and efficiently as we can.”