- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Aaron Nicodemus2023-11-17T18:52:00
France’s top court struck down a fine of 1.8 billion euros (U.S. $2 billion) imposed on UBS in 2021 by a lower court, despite upholding a guilty verdict related to money laundering and tax fraud in the Swiss bank’s cross-border activities.
The decision, released Wednesday by the Cour de Cassation, means the guilty finding against UBS delivered by the Paris Court of Appeal in December 2021 will stand. But the French Supreme Court ordered the appeals court to hold a new trial to reconsider whether a fine should be imposed at all and, if so, the size of the penalty.
The original 2021 appeals court decision found UBS guilty of unlawful solicitation and aggravated laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud relating to the bank’s cross-border business activities in France between 2004 and 2012, according to a UBS press release at the time. The court found UBS not guilty of aiding and abetting the laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud, the bank said.
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A year of significant change in the Swiss banking sector, including the acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS, has the country’s financial regulator prioritizing new risk areas on its radar.
UBS and several of its U.S. affiliates agreed to pay $1.44 billion as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice regarding the underwriting and issuance of residential mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
The Federal Reserve Board fined UBS $268.5 million regarding recent acquisition Credit Suisse’s credit risk management failures at collapsed U.S. hedge fund Archegos Capital Management. UBS also settled matters with U.K. and Swiss authorities.
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.
