ING Bank to Pay $619 Million to Settle Liability for Sanctions Violations, OFAC Says
The Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control has a $619 million settlement with ING Bank to settle potential liability for apparent violations of U.S. sanctions, it said. That makes it the largest OFAC settlement of any kind to date, and resolves OFAC's investigation into ING Bank's intentional manipulation and deletion of information about U.S.-sanctioned parties in more than 20,000 financial and trade transactions routed through third-party banks located in the U.S. between 2002 and 2007, OFAC said.
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OFAC said the actions were primarily in apparent violation of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (CACR), 31 C.F.R. part 515, but also of the Iranian Transactions Regulations (ITR), 31 C.F.R. part 560; the Burmese Sanctions Regulations (BSR), 31 C.F.R. part 537; the Sudanese Sanctions Regulations (SSR), 31 C.F.R. part 538; and the now-repealed version of the Libyan Sanctions Regulations (LSR), 31 C.F.R. part 550. ING's settlement with OFAC is simultaneous with settlements with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice's National Security Division, the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section and the New York County District Attorney's Office.
ING's actions allegedly included routing $1.6 billion through the U.S. despite U.S. sanctions. Beginning in the 1990s, at the instruction of senior bank management, ING Bank employees in Curacao began omitting references to Cuba in payment messages sent to the U.S. in order to prevent U.S. financial institutions from identifying and interdicting prohibited transactions, OFAC said. The same practice was also used by other branches of ING Bank's Wholesale Banking Division, including in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, it said.
ING has assured OFAC that it has terminated the conduct leading to the June 12 settlement, OFAC said. Under the settlement, ING is required to conduct a review of, and to submit a report to OFAC regarding, its policies and procedures and their implementation, taking an appropriate risk-focused sampling of U.S. dollar payments to ensure that its OFAC compliance program is functioning effectively.