- 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.
German petrochemical parts supplier Aiotec agreed to pay $14.5 million to settle allegations that it engaged in a four-year conspiracy to dismantle and ship a plastics manufacturing plant owned by a U.S. company to Iran, in violation of U.S. sanctions.
Kiromic BioPharma will pay no fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission after self-reporting that it failed to disclose material information about two cancer drugs to investors.
The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority fined the London branch of Australian-based Macquarie Bank Limited more than 13 million pounds (U.S. $16.3 million) for “serious control failures” that allowed a trader to conceal hundreds of fictitious trades over a 20-month period.
