Category: banks

Former Goldman Sachs Group banker Roger Ng won postponement of the start of his 10-year prison term for about three months until Aug 7, a federal judge ruled.

US District Judge Margo Brodie, who sentenced Ng in March for his role in the global 1MDB fraud, granted his request for a delay Monday without explanation.

Ng had been set to begin his prison term May 4. 

Defence lawyer Marc Agnifilo on Friday asked for the delay so Ng could spend more time with his wife and 10-year-old daughter, who had travelled to New York from Malaysia.

JPMorgan Chase, one of the biggest banks in the U.S., is buying the troubled First Republic Bank’s deposits, a “substantial amount of their assets and certain liabilities,” JPMorgan Chase said in a press release Monday.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation announced early Monday that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp had taken possession of First Republic.

This marks the third time the U.S. government has taken control of a U.S. lender this year.

First Republic is the third — and biggest — U.S. bank to fail this year. In March, federal regulators swept in to protect customers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Citing potential risk to the broader financial system, they took unprecedented action to insure all deposits at the two banks — even deposits that exceeded the FDIC’s $250,000 threshold for insurance.

First Republic Bank, on the brink of collapse in the weeks after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, has finally fallen over, but with a relatively quick resolution into its next chapter: today the FDIC announced that it was being closed by the the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, that the FDIC was appointed as receiver, and that the FDIC would be selling the assets to JPMorgan.

Its assets and deposits total just over $330 billion together.

Specifically, “to protect depositors, the FDIC is entering into a purchase and assumption agreement with JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, Columbus, Ohio, to assume all of the deposits and substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank,” it said.

The FDIC also confirmed deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC at an estimated cost of about $13 billion to its insurance fund.

The US central bank has said it failed to act with “sufficient force and urgency” in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last month in the country’s biggest bank failure since 2008.

The conclusion is one of the main findings from the Federal Reserve’s investigation of the episode.

It sparked global fears about the state of the banking industry.

The review comes as another US lender, First Republic, remains in trouble.

US regulators are reported to be working on a potential rescue for the struggling firm, which was the 14th largest bank in the US at the end of last year.

It’s been six weeks since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank threatened to kick off a nationwide bank run. Now, U.S. regulators are due to issue their postmortem reports.

The Federal Reserve plans to release a report Friday on whether there were lapses in its oversight of Silicon Valley Bank that may have contributed to the bank’s failure.

Separately, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will also report Friday on how the regulator supervised New York-based Signature Bank, which failed days after the Silicon Valley lender.

The sudden implosion of two big regional banks rattled nerves throughout the financial system last month, forcing the federal government to take emergency steps to prevent a nationwide bank run.

The US Supreme Court rejected Wednesday the claim of sovereign immunity by a Turkish bank accused of violating Iran sanctions, in a case that has added tensions to ties between Washington and Ankara.

Halkbank was hit with US criminal charges in 2019 that it took part in a yearlong scheme to launder billions of dollars worth of Iranian oil and natural gas proceeds, violating sanctions on Iran.

The funds were used to buy gold and the transactions were disguised as food and medicine purchases in order to fall under a humanitarian exemption to the sanctions, according to court documents.

As part of the scheme, Halkbank allegedly used front companies to funnel $20 billion to Iran, including $1 billion through the US financial system, the US Justice Department said.

The United States charged the bank with six counts of fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses, calling it one of the most serious sanctions-breaking cases it has seen.

When KPMG LLP gave Silicon Valley Bank a clean bill of health just 14 days before the lender went under, the Big Four audit firm pointed to potential losses on loans to its customers as one of its so-called critical audit issues. But the audit opinion didn’t mention what really brought the bank down: its unrealized losses on bonds and its ability to sustain them, given its reliance on potentially volatile deposits.

“The auditors didn’t mention the fire in the basement or the box of dynamite on the second floor, but they did mention the peeling paint on the planter,” says Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan.”How could they have overlooked interest rate risk?” The current banking crisis is the first litmus test of the system of critical audit issues, a measure designed to help investors decipher hidden risks and uncertainties in financial statements.

Auditors are required to record any critical audit issues when approving a public company’s books. Regulators define them as matters that have a significant impact on financial statements and involve “especially difficult, subjective or complex” judgments by auditors.

A U.S. judge rejected requests to sever JPMorgan Chase & Co’s lawsuit accusing former executive Jes Staley of concealing what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein from two related lawsuits over its work for the late sex offender.

Monday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan is a defeat for Staley, who said the scheduled Oct. 23 trial for all three cases left him too little time to defend against JPMorgan’s “slanderous” accusations.

It is also a defeat for women who claim that Epstein sexually abused them and are suing the largest U.S. bank.

They claimed that JPMorgan sued Staley as a means to “harass and intimidate” them into revealing private medical records and communications in their case.

Epstein was a JPMorgan client from 2000 to 2013. The U.S. Virgin Islands, where the financier had a home, is also suing JPMorgan.

+ Walmart is suing Capital One in an attempt to end its credit-card contract with the bank.
+ The retailer said the McLean, Virginia-based bank has repeatedly failed to meet a number of contractual obligations in its card partnership deal, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
+ Capital One “was consistently unable to meet the customer-service standards” outlined in its contract, such as issuing replacement cards and promptly processing payments and posting transactions, Walmart alleged in the suit.

Most Wall Street banks are likely to report lower quarterly earnings and face a dour outlook for the rest of the year, with last month’s regional banking crisis and a slowing economy expected to hurt profitability.

Earnings per share for the six biggest U.S. banks are expected to be down about 10% from a year earlier, analyst estimates from Refinitiv I/B/E/S show. Banks start reporting results on April 14.

Access to cheap deposits, which swelled for bigger banks as savers fled smaller lenders in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse last month, likely boosted net interest income for the largest banks, analysts said.

The American bank Wells Fargo has been fined $97.8m (£79m) by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department for breaching US sanctions laws. Inadequate oversight meant that it allowed a foreign institution to process $532m in illegal transactions involving Iran, Syria and Sudan. Wells Fargo said it stopped dealing with the client in 2015.

The U.S. Virgin Islands issued subpoenas this week to Sergey Brin, Thomas Pritzker, Mortimer Zuckerman and Michael Ovitz to gather information for its civil lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase & Co. over the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoenas from the U.S. territory’s attorney general seek any communications and documents related to the bank and Epstein, the people said.

The four men are some of the wealthiest people in the U.S., and it couldn’t be determined why they were being asked for the communications and documents. In civil cases, lawyers can use subpoenas during the discovery process to get information from people who aren’t a party to a lawsuit but could provide evidence related to the case.

The U.S. Virgin Islands sued JPMorgan late last year in a Manhattan federal court, saying the bank facilitated Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and abuse by allowing the late financier to remain a client and helping him send money to his victims. The civil lawsuit alleges that JPMorgan received referrals of high-value business opportunities from Epstein and turned a blind eye to his activities. The bank has said it didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes and can’t be held liable.

The United Arab Emirates’ central bank on Friday said it will cancel the licence it granted last year to Russia’s MTS bank, which was placed under British and US sanctions in February.

Operations at the bank’s UAE branch, which is licensed in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, will be wound down within six months under UAE central bank supervision.

A statement from MTS Bank said it will fulfil all settlement obligations to existing customers and guarantee the safety of their funds for six months.

“This decision comes after considering the available options regarding the new status of the MTS Bank and taking into account the sanctions risks associated with the bank,” the UAE central bank’s statement said.

(Reuters) -A Johnson & Johnson company cannot delay a court order dismissing its bankruptcy, a U.S. court said on Friday, despite the company’s planned Supreme Court appeal to use bankruptcy to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits over its talc products. J&J sought to use the bankruptcy of its subsidiary company, LTL Management, to halt more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging…

Four bankers from a Russian bank’s Swiss branch have been found guilty by a Zurich court over vast sums going into the accounts of a close confidant of President Vladimir Putin.

The accounts in the Swiss arm of Gazprombank were held by Sergei Roldugin, the artistic director of the St. Petersburg Music House, who is often dubbed Putin’s cellist.

Roldugin has been a friend of Putin for more than four decades and is godfather to one of the Russian leader’s daughters.

The four men were found guilty of “lack of due diligence in financial transactions”, the Zurich District Court said in its verdict released to media on Thursday, over the millions of Swiss francs flowing through Roldugin’s account.

Under Swiss law, the bankers — two Russians, one Swiss and a Russian-born British national — cannot be identified.

The bank branch’s chief executive was fined 540,000 Swiss francs ($590,200).

For decades, the major banks – along with AMP – dominated the financial planning landscape, employing or authorising the vast majority of licensed advisers. The remaining 16,000 providers – most of them independent or privately owned – are insufficient in number to meet the advice needs of the millions of Baby Boomers set to retire in coming years.

And the mountains of red tape the remaining advisers must comply with – thanks largely, it must be said, to the misdeeds of the bank-owned advice providers – have made their services too expensive for most families to afford even if they wanted to.