The
Money Laundering Prevention Service (Sepblac)
concludes, six years after the intervention and disappearance of the
Bank of Madrid
, the subsidiary of the
Private Bank of Andorra
in Spain, which did not launder funds of illicit origin.
The agency dependent on the
Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation
now maintains that it
has detected "deficiencies" in the protocols to detect deposits from criminal activities
but highlights that the entity had protocols "relevant in matters such as risk assessment and management, prevention or communications to Sepblac ".
That is to say, "without prejudice to the deficiencies that could be improved by the entity, it
did have internal policies and procedures regarding the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing
that had been subject to continuous improvements in the years immediately prior to the inspection". "In this way", asserts Sepblac, "it must be concluded" that
the entity has not incurred in "any punishable act subject to serious infringements
.
"
The
Andorran Private Banking
and its Spanish subsidiary were intervened in
2015
, when the
Andorran National Finance Institute (INAF)
, the country's financial regulator, intervened the entities, which were being investigated by the United States for channeling funds allegedly from organized crime . Immediately afterwards, the Bank of Spain appointed a team of auditors and Sepblac reported the entities to the Public Prosecutor's Office after detecting irregular operations.
Since then, the owners of the defunct Banca Privada de Andorra,
the Cierco brothers, have won all the legal proceedings
. The courts came to conclude that there is no evidence that "they allowed or facilitated laundering operations" in their entities or that "they deliberately and consciously decided that the control system was permeable and easily circumvented."
Knowing the files by criminal means and now also by administrative, the Ciercos have launched a multimillion-dollar claim against the Spanish State that rises to
250 million in damages and losses
at the same time that they
allude to political motivations for the liquidation of its financial entities
. Among them, the action of the Government chaired by
Mariano Rajoy
to obtain the accounts that the
former president of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol, and his family
hid in their bank in the Principality.
The new Sepblac resolution, to which EL MUNDO has had exclusive access, emphasizes that "after analyzing the entity's manual" to prevent money laundering, "it must coincide in the existence of deficiencies detected by the inspection." Thus, "its structure would contain relevant elements in matters such as risk assessment and management, customer admission policy, due diligence, information, internal control, guarantee of compliance, internal communications, communications by indication to Sepblac and systematic communications and bodies Prevention (Regulatory Compliance Department and Prevention Committee) ". "Ultimately, and without prejudice to the aforementioned deficiencies that were susceptible to improvement by the entity," he continues,the entity did have internal policies and procedures for the prevention of money laundering that had been subject to continuous improvements in the years immediately prior to the inspection ".
As an example of the operation analyzed, Sepblac points out that
the Bank of Madrid's Board of Directors
unanimously approved the granting of loans to Russian citizens
Andrei Petrov and Viktor Kanaikine
, "allegedly related to a Russian mafia network." Not surprisingly, the first of them was arrested in January 2013 in the framework of 'Operation Clotilde'. Both were granted a mortgage loan of one million euros to finance the construction of commercial premises in
Lloret de Mar
.
Said agreement was adopted "against the opinion of
the Compliance Department
, which in a report indicated the impossibility of knowing the entity's ownership or control structure and stated that there was not enough information to form a judgment on the admissibility or not of the customer". "However, the operation was accepted and its communication was not carried out due to suspicious operations."
Sepblac endorses the arguments used so far by the courts to exonerate the Bank of Madrid from money laundering operations, such as that "there are no elements that allow it to be considered" that the bank "had access to any information that implied" the mentioned Russian citizens "with the legal proceedings" against them. At the same time, "a study was carried out by the corresponding control body that ruled that no signs of money laundering had been detected." Being the "controls" of the bank, he emphasizes, "real and serious".
At the time of the intervention, the bank had more than
300 million in customer deposits
,
65 million in
equity and had assets managed in collective investment institutions of more than
1,000 million
.
Sepblac adds that "no higher than average risks were detected" in this and other investigated operations, such as those involving numerous Venezuelan Chavista leaders.
Reason why "the Board of Directors of Banco de Madrid had a favorable report from the
Risk Unit
as well as one from
the Regulatory Compliance Department
that existed and was not negative."
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