Federal regulators slapped Wells Fargo with a total of $97.8 million in fines for its role in helping a foreign bank avoid U.S. sanctions on more than half a billion dollars of transactions.
The Federal Reserve dinged the San Francisco-based bank for $67.8 million, while the Treasury Department, through its Office of Foreign Assets Control, tacked on an additional $30 million in penalties.
Between 2010 and 2015, Wells Fargo provided a trading platform to an unnamed foreign bank, according to
A consent order serves as a settlement between a bank and its regulator. By accepting its terms, Wells Fargo has waived its right to contest the matter and agreed to pay all associated fines. The $1.88 trillion bank neither admits or denies the Fed's allegations outlined in the order.
"Wells Fargo is pleased to resolve this legacy matter involving conduct that ended in 2015, which we voluntarily self-reported and fully cooperated with OFAC and the Federal Reserve Board to address," a bank spokesperson said in a written statement.
The Fed's document does not name the foreign bank or specify where the sanctioned parties were located. The platform was Eximbills, a finance system developed by China-based China Systems Corp. and distributed by the Indonesia-based information technology firm Refine Consulting.
In its order, the Fed notes that Wells Fargo's risk management and oversight framework "failed to identify and address the legal and compliance risks" associated with the foreign bank and with allowing it to use the Eximbills platform.
Since Wells Fargo identified the violation and flagged it to regulators in 2015, it has "remediated" the violations, the consent order notes. Still, the Fed determined that Wells Fargo's "unsafe and unsound" risk management practices "warrant the assessment of a civil money penalty."
Wells Fargo is no stranger to regulator fines or critiques of its risk management practices during the 2010s.
The bank has been under a severe asset growth cap
In the years since the penalty was imposed, regulators have unearthed still more misdeeds by the bank. Last December, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued Wells Fargo a
The last time Wells Fargo ran afoul of OFAC regulations was between 2005 and 2006, when it processed transactions for an account holder based in Iran. That incident resulted in just under $56,000 of financial services being exported to the Middle Eastern country in violation of U.S. sanctions. The bank
