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DBS, UBS react to MAS penalties arising from 1MDB investigation

Michelle Zhu Published on Tue, Oct 11, 2016 / 1:45 PM GMT+8

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SINGAPORE (Oct 11): DBS Bank and UBS Singapore have issued their responses to the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) announcement this morning which revealed that the banks have been found to have breached the MAS’s anti-money laundering (AML) controls.

To recap, the central bank has imposed financial penalties on DBS and UBS of $1 million and $1.3 million respectively. This came with MAS’s decision to withdraw the merchant bank status of Falcon Bank’s Singapore branch, in addition to financial penalties amounting to $4.3 million for 14 breaches of MAS regulations.

Both DBS and UBS were found to have “deficiencies… in the on-boarding of new accounts, weaknesses in corroborating the source of funds, inadequate scrutiny of customers’ transactions and activities, and failure to file timely suspicious transactions” in investigations conducted by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) and MAS regarding the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal.