- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Aaron Nicodemus2023-11-29T21:55:00
There are a slew of compliance lessons to be learned from the $4.3 billion settlement that Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, reached with a handful of U.S. government agencies.
The largest of those lessons is the significant penalties and company leadership, including the chief compliance officer, held personally responsible for their alleged attempts to evade U.S. laws to hold onto the exchange’s most valuable clients.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) detailed in its charging document how Binance did not comply with U.S. laws and regulations related to the anti-money laundering (AML) provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act, which also requires new customers to be vetted and transactions to be monitored for suspicious activities.
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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.
Fraud remains the leading form of identity-related suspicious activity cited in Bank Secrecy Act reports by a large margin, while technologies enable greater overall risks around exploitation, according to new research from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
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.
