ANZ joins long list of banks ticked off for anti-money laundering failures
Thursday, 27 April 2023
The Reserve Bank Te Pūtea Matua is taking no enforcement action against ANZ after finding the bank breached anti-money laundering laws.
No penalty has been levied against ANZ, a spokesperson for the bank said.
ANZ dobbed itself in for what the Reserve Bank said were “three prescribed transaction reporting matters to RBNZ, where transaction reports had not been filed within the prescribed timeframe”.
Under anti-money laundering laws, banks have to report potentially suspicious transactions.
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After its investigation into 6409 transaction reports from the ANZ, the Reserve Bank concluded ANZ had materially breached the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act.
An ANZ spokesperson said: “We are acutely aware of our role in preventing financial crime and will continue to proactively engage with regulators and law enforcement.”
Kerry Beaumont, the Reserve Bank’s enforcement and resolution director, said the Reserve Bank was imposing temporary additional reporting obligations on ANZ to ensure the steps ANZ had taken to avoid a repeat failure were effective.
“Upon identifying the transactions that were not reported, ANZ promptly notified the Reserve Bank and remediated all issues, including, retrospectively reporting all affected transactions to the Police’s Financial Intelligence Unit,” Beaumont said.
“ANZ’s response to the reporting failures is an example of the prompt remediation and timely and proactive engagement with the Reserve Bank that is expected from all reporting entities,” she said.
ANZ is not the first bank in New Zealand to face bad publicity over anti-money laundering failures.
In July last year, the Reserve Bank issued a formal anti-money laundering warning to BNZ for failing to report the correct location for around 50,000 domestic physical cash transactions in prescribed transaction reports (PTR) between November 2018 and April 2020.
The year before, TSB Bank was ordered by the High Court to pay $3.5 million for four breaches of anti-money laundering laws.
In 2021, Westpac was slapped with a warning from the Reserve Bank for failing to report suspect transactions under anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism laws.
In 2015, state-owned Kiwibank was given a public telling off by the Reserve Bank over its failure to adhere to legislation which aims to counter terrorism financing.
In a statement Wellington-headquartered Kiwibank said the Resever Bank 'found that during the period June 2013 to June 2014, Kiwibank did not always have fully compliant procedures' in relation to the Anti-Money Laundering/Countering Financing of Terrorism Act which came into effect in 2013.
New Zealand bank failures have been modest compared to anti-money laundering bank blunders in Australia.
In Australia in November 2019, Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer resigned after it was revealed anti-money laundering failures had “given a free pass to paedophiles”.
His resignation came six days after the nation's financial crimes agency accused Australia's second-largest lender of more than 23 million breaches of money-laundering laws, including failing to detect payments to child pornographers in the Philippines.
The previous year, Commonwealth Bank of Australia was given the largest fine in Australian corporate history.
The bank was ordered to pay A$700m (NZ$761m) for failing to carry out appropriate anti-money laundering controls.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the Reserve Bank was taking no immediate enforcement action against ANZ and the potential outcome remained uncertain. In fact the Reserve Bank is not taking any further action. (Amended at 4.12pm, April 27, 2023)