Weekly Global News Wrap Up: Russian money laundering scandal sweeps European banks; Wells Fargo shells out record $240m settlement over bogus accounts
And JPMorgan Chase is moving away from prison finance.
From Bloomberg: More European banks are being drawn into money-laundering allegations centered on dirty Russian money which initially centered on Danske Bank A/S in Denmark and Sweden’s Swedbank AB, as allegations of suspicious transfers widened to include Raiffeisen Bank International AG in Austria and several Dutch institutions.
The fresh allegations are based on files obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP, and 15min.lt, a Lithuanian website. They were reported by a number of participating media outlets and nicknamed Troika Laundromat because many of the shell companies involved in the transactions allegedly had ties to Troika Dialog, a Russian investment bank that was bought by state-owned Sberbank PJSC in 2012.
From CNBC: Wells Fargo officials have reached a record $240m settlement with U.S. shareholders over the creation by bank employees of millions of unauthorized customer accounts.
It resolves claims that the officials breached their fiduciary duties by knowing about or consciously disregarding the bogus accounts, and failing to stop their creation.
From Reuters: JPMorgan Chase & Co has decided to stop financing private operators of prisons and detention centers, which have become targets of protests over Trump administration immigration policies.
“We will no longer bank the private prison industry,” a company spokesman told Reuters, adding that the decision is a result of the bank’s ongoing evaluations of the costs and benefits of serving different industries.
JPMorgan is one of several banks that have underwritten bonds or syndicated loans for CoreCivic Inc and GEO Group Inc, the two major private prison operators in the United States.