FINRA Fines BNP Paribas $15 Mln For Anti-money Laundering Program Failures

(RTTNews) - FINRA Thursday said it has fined BNP Paribas Securities Corp. and BNP Paribas Prime Brokerage, Inc. $15 million for anti-money laundering program and supervisory failures involving penny stock deposits and resales, and wire transfers, that spanned four years.

As part of the settlement, FINRA also required BNP to certify within 90 days that BNP's procedures are reasonably designed to achieve compliance in these areas.

FINRA found that from February 2013 to March 2017, despite its penny stock activity, BNP did not develop and implement a written AML program that could reasonably be expected to detect and cause the reporting of potentially suspicious transactions.

Until 2016, BNP's AML program did not include any surveillance targeting potential suspicious transactions involving penny stocks, even though BNP accepted the deposit of nearly 31 billion shares of penny stocks, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, from its clients, including from so-called "toxic debt financiers."

As a result, BNP facilitated the removal of restrictive legends from approximately $12.5 million worth of penny stocks without any review to evaluate the transactions for compliance with Section 5.