WASHINGTON—The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has assessed a $1.5 million civil money penalty on South Dakota-chartered The Kingdom Trust Company (Kingdom Trust) for willful violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and its implementing regulations. This is FinCEN’s first enforcement action against a trust company.
“Kingdom Trust had virtually no process to identify and report suspicious transactions, resulting in it processing over $4 billion in international wires with essentially no controls,” said FinCEN’s Acting Director Himamauli Das. “This enforcement action is an important statement that we will not tolerate trust companies with weak compliance programs that fail to identify and report suspicious activities, particularly with respect to high-risk customers whose businesses pose an elevated risk of money laundering.”
Kingdom Trust admits that it willfully failed to accurately and timely report hundreds of transactions to FinCEN involving suspicious activity by its customers, including transactions with connections to a trade-based money laundering scheme and multiple securities fraud schemes that were the subject of both criminal and civil actions. These failures stemmed from Kingdom Trust’s severely underdeveloped process for identifying and reporting suspicious activity.
FinCEN appreciates the close collaboration and invaluable assistance of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on this matter.
For additional information regarding the facts and circumstances associated with this enforcement action, please see the Consent Order here.