(Compliance Week) - South Dakota-based Kingdom Trust Co. agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for anti-money laundering (AML) deficiencies that resulted in violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA).
“Kingdom Trust had virtually no process to identify and report suspicious transactions, resulting in it processing over $4 billion in international wires with essentially no controls,” said FinCEN Acting Director Himamauli Das in a press release Wednesday.
Kingdom Trust, whose primary business offering is the provision of custody services to people with self-directed individual retirement accounts, provided account and payment services to foreign securities and investment firms located in Latin America that had elevated money laundering risks.
Some of those transactions had connections to a “trade-based money laundering scheme and multiple securities fraud schemes that were the subject of both criminal and civil actions,” FinCEN said.
By Aaron Nicodemus
April 26, 2023
