“We did not do it well,” ABN Amro chief executive Robert Swaak told an online press conference on April 19, 2021. “That hurts us and we take full responsibility.” The Dutch bank had just agreed to pay 480 million euros to prosecutors to settle a money laundering case.
The Public Prosecution Service, known as the OM, said the bank had broken the Netherlands’ anti-money laundering law for years and in a structural way. It also accused ABN Amro of “culpable money laundering”: the bank should have seen that some of the money passing through its accounts probably came from crime, and it did too little about it. The bank is one of the three largest in the country and carries millions of account holders in the Netherlands, processing more than a billion transactions a year.
What investigators found
The case began in the second half of 2019. The Dutch central bank, DNB, had run several inspections over a long period and found serious violations, and it had stepped in more than once. The fiscal investigation service FIOD then received concrete tips about dozens of ABN Amro customers.
The OM’s findings were blunt. For roughly 5.5 million mass-retail customers, the bank used an automatic identity check and nothing more, and placed them in the lowest risk category, “00 neutral.” Customer due diligence was therefore too shallow. Its transaction-monitoring system also threw up more alerts than staff could handle, so the bank carried a backlog for several years, and some suspicious transactions were reported late to the financial intelligence unit. The OM said the period under investigation ran from 2014 through 2020.
Former executives named
The settlement did not end the matter for individuals. The OM named three former members of the bank’s management board as suspects, and said it would examine whether crimes had been committed and whether there was enough evidence. One of them is Gerrit Zalm, who sat on the board from 2008 through 2016. Zalm confirmed it to NOS but declined to discuss the substance.
The fallout spread quickly. Danske Bank, where Zalm now works, announced that day that he was stepping down from its board. His co-director Chris Vogelzang, also a suspect, resigned as well. Vogelzang said he was “very surprised” by the prosecutors’ decision and insisted he had done his work at ABN Amro with integrity. Joop Wijn, a board member from 2010 to 2017, told Schiphol Group he is a suspect too. He was due to leave Schiphol’s supervisory board on 1 June.
Apology without admission
ABN Amro offered what it called “sincere apologies.” Swaak said the bank has a legal and moral duty to protect the financial system from criminals, and that it had not succeeded in the past. The bank says it has parted ways with thousands of customers since 2019 because the risk of wrongdoing was relatively high.
Still, Swaak was careful about the legal line. A settlement means accepting the facts and their seriousness, he said, but there is “expressly no admission of guilt” in it. Wopke Hoekstra called the OM’s conclusions “clear and very painful” and said he would speak with the bank, DNB and NLFI about the consequences.
ING went through something similar in 2018, when it settled with the OM for millions of euros. The court of appeal in The Hague had ruled the year before that its former chief, Ralph Hamers, must be prosecuted in person after all.
Sources
- ABN Amro schikt voor 480 miljoen om witwasfraude, ook Gerrit Zalm onderzocht (NOS / ANP)
- ABN AMRO betaalt 480 miljoen euro vanwege ernstige tekortkomingen bij het bestrijden van witwassen (Openbaar Ministerie)
