- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Aaron Nicodemus2023-11-21T23:38:00
Federal agencies hit Binance with more than $4.3 billion in penalties, prompted the resignation of its chief executive officer, and imposed multiple compliance monitorships on the virtual currency exchange as punishment for its repeated and intentional violations of U.S. anti-money laundering (AML) laws, sanctions, and other regulations.
The Department of Justice (DOJ); Treasury Department, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC); and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) made the announcements at a joint press conference Tuesday.
“Binance became the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in part because of the crimes it committed—now it is paying one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.
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Caroline Pham, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said compliance officers have a lot to worry about if they or their firms are subject to CFTC enforcement during her fireside chat at CW’s Financial Crimes Summit.
Why the wild disparity in the sentences of Binance’s Changpeng Zhao and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried? Aaron Nicodemus argues the performance of the compliance teams at the two cryptocurrency exchanges was as big a contrast as the penalties earned by their respective founders.
The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada imposed a penalty of approximately CAD$6 million (U.S. $4.4 million) against crypto platform Binance over alleged noncompliance with the country’s anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism law.
A bank examiner and senior manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond pled guilty to insider trading after allegedly misappropriating confidential information on seven banks to make profitable trades.
New York-based investment firm Drexel Hamilton will pay more than $1.1 million in penalties, with four current and former employees paying fines as well over committing hundreds of violations of rules regarding the sale of municipal bonds.
A publicly traded cryptocurrency mining company will pay $10 million and completely change its business model to one with “lower corruption risk” as part of a settlement over violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), two regulators announced.
