One of the areas in the fight against bribery and corruption that regulators are beginning to focus on is the role of banks in facilitating such transactions. I thought about this connection when I read a recent article in the Financial Times about the banks now caught up in the FIFA corruption scandal. Numerous banks, such as BNP Paribas, JP Banamex, HSBC, Standard Chartered and UBS have paid heavy fines for failures around anti-money laundering controls and now some of these banks are in talks with the Justice Department about what they knew and when they knew it (sound familiar?) in connection with the FIFA investigation.
Once again, American authorities are bumping up against Swiss banking secrecy laws in the investigation. To remedy this, U.S. authorities are trying to reach an agreement with the Swiss government giving US authorities greater and more unrestricted access to information in FIFA-concerned bank accounts so that they will not have to make individual requests for data. U.S. regulators have reverted to the 2010 approval of legislation by Switzerland which allowed the Swiss bank UBS to provide the names of its American clients who were suspected of evading U.S. taxes.
