Category: banks

When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called for heads to roll after the 2016 census was pulled offline – amid fears IBM’s data servers hosting the survey had been infiltrated – the American enterprise technology giant made an important decision. IBM ran most of the big mainframe systems that had powered core government functions for several decades, earning it billions of dollars a year in fees and making the Australian government one of its top global clients. No census data was…

Justice Akintayo Aluko of the Federal High Court, in Lagos has ordered 27 commercial banks in the country, to placed Post-No-Debit (PND) on the accounts of a tourism company, ‘La Campagne Tropicana Beach Resort’ over alleged N46, 798, 095.94 . The judge, made the order of Mareva injunction on May 17, 2023, while granting an Exparte motion marked FHC/L/CS/746/2023, filed and argued by Barrister George C. Duru, on behalf of Ecobank Nigeria Limited and ETI Specialized Resolution Company Limited The…

European Union officials are considering whether to send Ukraine profits generated from Russian assets frozen within the bloc, the Financial Times has reported, citing people familiar with the discussions. EU member states and European Commission officials convened on Wednesday to examine how they might move funds held at Euroclear, the world’s largest settlement house, over to Ukraine, as Russian-owned assets there have accrued interest since they were first frozen. Targeted under an unprecedented Western sanctions campaign, the Russian assets stuck at…

The new owner of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) US operations, First Citizens, is cutting around 500 roles held by former SVB workers, the BBC understands. Two months ago, First Citizens bought the business after SVB’s collapse. The failure of SVB, along with two other US banks, triggered fears of a more widespread banking crisis, which forced authorities to step in. SVB’s business in the UK was bought in March by London-headquartered banking giant HSBC for a nominal £1 ($1.25). In…

A Lebanese judge questioned the country’s embattled central bank governor Wednesday and confiscated his Lebanese and French passports following an arrest warrant from France over corruption charges, judicial officials said. Riad Salameh left immediately after questioning by Judge Imad Kabalan in Beirut, the officials said on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The questioning lasted about 80 minutes, they said. France, Germany and Luxembourg are investigating Salameh and his associates over myriad alleged financial crimes, including illicit enrichment and…

  (Bloomberg) — Blackstone Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Schwarzman said the investment giant is in talks with several US regional banks to explore purchases of assets and loans they originate. “Pressure on those regional banks won’t just come from the markets,” he said in a video interview Wednesday for the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha. “It will come from regulators, and that will make them less apt to provide credit.” Regional banks’ retreat from lending to swaths of the…

LONDON – Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Wednesday it had provisionally found five major global banks allegedly broke UK competition law by exchanging sensitive information on government bond trading activities in one-to-one online chats. In a statement, the watchdog alleged Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Canada each unlawfully shared information by participating in one or more one-to-one conversations in Bloomberg chatrooms between a small number of traders at varying times between 2009…

SINGAPORE – Financial institutions are required to alert the police and the financial regulator if they suspect that a transaction could be related to a crime, although there is no threshold set for when they must flag these activities. They are also required to step up their measures to manage the higher risks of money laundering and terrorism financing posed by customers such as wealthy individuals, said a Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) spokesman on Tuesday. MAS said financial institutions…

ZURICH – Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court has received 230 claims against the country’s financial regulator Finma after it wrote off the value of Credit Suisse’s AT1 bonds, the court said on Tuesday. The claims related to 2,500 individual parties, a court spokesman told Reuters. The court in the north-eastern Swiss city of St Gallen, declined to say whether the time limit for filing further claims had expired or the amount of compensation claimed. The bond holders have sued Finma after…

Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a pension fund-led lawsuit that accused the bank of defrauding shareholders by misleading them over the progress it was making to rectify a slew of scandals. The Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension & Relief Fund and the state of Rhode Island were among the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in June 2020 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The…

First Citizens BancShares Inc, which acquired Silicon Valley Bank following its collapse, sued HSBC Holdings PLC on Monday, accusing it of poaching more than 40 of the failed bank’s employees in order to launch its own U.S. venture banking business. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court says HSBC violated federal law by hiring away the workers so it could gain access to Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) trade secrets including information about clients in the tech and healthcare sectors….

Adam Kovacevich is the CEO and founder of a center-left tech industry coalition called Chamber of Progress and has worked at the intersection of tech and politics for 20 years, leading public policy at Google and Lime and serving as a Democratic Hill aide. When the Biden administration proposed new protections earlier this month to prevent law enforcement from demanding reproductive healthcare data from companies, they took a critical first step in protecting our personal data. But there remains a…

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The head of the Russian private army Wagner claimed Saturday that his forces have taken control of the city of Bakhmut after the longest and most grinding battle of the Russia-Ukraine war, but Ukrainian defense officials denied it. In a video posted on Telegram, Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin said the city came under complete Russian control at about midday Saturday. He spoke flanked by about half a dozen fighters, with ruined buildings in the background and…

The international community will not fall in line with the pro-Western rules pushed by the G7 and not allow the US-led group to dominate world affairs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.  “China will never accept the so-called rules imposed by the few. The international community does not and will not accept the G7-dominated Western rules that seek to divide the world based on ideologies and values,” the statement read. The Foreign Ministry went on to…

Shenderovich then confirmed on Facebook he was “barred from his own performance in London” but still did not explain the reasons behind the incident. He also mockingly thanked “all the idiots” responsible “for such an incredible promotion.”  The author eventually moved to nearby Regent’s Park together with his would-be audience, where he held an impromptu performance “in the natural setting,” Shenderovich himself said in his Facebook statement. The author called the event “one of his best performances” and said that…

Although it has claimed to be fighting Daesh* and other terrorist groups in Syria since 2014, the US military has never received permission from the Syrian government to operate there. In addition, US forces continue to help occupy the eastern third of the country under the guise of supporting allied Kurdish forces. Having previously claimed that a May 3 airstrike in northwestern Syria killed a top Al-Qaeda** leader, the Pentagon is now expressing doubts. “We are no longer confident we…