The National Bank announces a comprehensive review and updating of approaches to the application of fines to banks for key violations of anti-money laundering (AML/CFT) and currency legislation, a comparison of documents indicates an increase in individual fines from 2 to 8 times.
“(This) will help prevent banks from committing violations of legal requirements, increasing responsibility for their failure/inadequate implementation, as well as the effectiveness of the impact measure, its deterrent nature in order to change the approach to the proper organization of the bank, the functioning of an appropriate risk management system,” the NBU said in a press release on Friday.
It is specified that the amendments were introduced by the NBU №80 of June 21, which comes into force on June 24, 2023.
In particular, for the violation of financial monitoring the scale with the ceiling of fines now starts from UAH 1 million, while previously it was UAH 0.4 million, and after the step of UAH 10 million the new value of UAH 50 million with a saved ceiling of UAH 135.15 million, with the specification that this ceiling applies even if there are several violations.
The NBU specified that fines of up to UAH 50 mln may be imposed for violations of legislative requirements in the field of CDD / CFT risk management or for improper checks on customers, while banks may receive fines of up to UAH 1 mln for failure to comply with internal documents on CDD / CFT legislative requirements in this area.
Inappropriate application of the risk-oriented approach to PEP clients, in particular, setting them an unreasonable risk level, taking disproportionate measures in accordance with the risk category, will be subject to a fine of up to UAH 10 million.
Also, the limits of fines for key violations in the field of currency legislation were revised and increased. In particular, significant violations (from UAH 1 million per transaction or from UAH 10 million in total) in the order of settlement of currency transactions, foreign exchange trading, transfer of currency valuables, cross-border movement, failure to perform / improper performance by the bank of currency supervision, violations of security measures are now punishable by a fine of up to UAH 1 million, whereas previously there were UAH 0.4 million.
Small amounts of violations may now be fined up to UAH 400 thousand instead of the previous UAH 50 thousand.
Other significant violations of currency legislation by the bank, including preventing or hindering to check the employees of the National Bank, failure of the bank to carry out the analysis, check documents on currency operations – up to 1% of the registered authorized capital of the bank, whereas before there was a limit of 8 million UAH.
