(Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network on Wednesday hit a South Dakota-chartered Kingdom Trust Company with a $1.5 million civil penalty for willfully violating a law requiring banks report suspicious transactions.
From February 2016 through March 2021, Kingdom Trust processed billions of transactions without proper controls aimed at preventing money laundering, FinCEN said in its consent order. The firm admitted to the willful violations in what FinCEN described in a statement as its first enforcement action against a trust company.
Kingdom Trust did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
“Kingdom Trust had virtually no process to identify and report suspicious transactions, resulting in it processing over $4 billion in international wires with essentially no controls,” FinCEN’s acting director Himamauli Das said in the statement.
(Reporting by Chris Prentice)