In a settlement announced yesterday by New York State’s financial regulator, Standard Chartered will pay a $300 million fine and suspend an important business activity because of its failure to weed out transactions prone to money-laundering, a punishing reminder of settlements in 2012, the New York Times reported today. Those settlements resolved accusations that Standard Chartered, in part through its New York branch, processed transactions for Iran and other countries blacklisted by the United States. The New York regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, once again penalized Standard Chartered for running afoul of the 2012 settlement, which he said required the bank to “remediate anti-money-laundering compliance problems.” An independent monitor, hired as part of Lawsky’s 2012 settlement, recently detected that the bank’s computer systems failed to flag wire transfers flowing from areas of the world considered vulnerable to money-laundering, according to Lawsky’s order. The order did not specify the number of transactions that the bank’s filters failed to identify, but a person briefed on the matter said that it was “in the millions.”
