CSSF watchdog issued over €4m in fines last year
Luxembourg’s financial regulator raked in more than €4 million in fines last year, according to its latest annual report published on Thursday.
The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) slapped a total of €4.3 million in fines on firms in 2021, a drop from €6 million the previous year, when a single fine issued to Banque Internationale à Luxembourg accounted for €4.6 million of the total.
Seven fines were for banks and three for investment firms for breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules. The penalties ranged from €35,000 to more than €1.3 million, the CSSF said in its annual report.
Three financial professionals were issued with fines ranging from €16,000 to €154,000, while one was served with a ban totalling six years.
There were 28 investment fund managers disciplined for various breaches during the year, including five fined for late submission of a questionnaire on money laundering, each ordered to pay between €5,000 and €10,000.
The largest fine to an investment fund was a €261,000 penalty imposed on Franklin Templeton for oversights of compliance, while JPMorgan Asset Management (Europe) received a €173,500 fine for providing incomplete or incorrect information to the CSSF through its risk management process.
Three auditors received fines of between €6,000 and €10,000 for misconduct leading to legal infringement in overseeing financial accounts. One auditing firm was fined €5,000 for failure to file a transparency report and three were fined between €1,500 and €5,000 for not complying with training requirements.
There has been a huge spike in the reports of firms claiming to be established in Luxembourg and which offer investment services without being authorised, the CSSF said. Luxembourg’s financial regulator referred 82 cases to the Prosecutor’s Office in 2021, a more than six-fold increase since 2018, when there were 13 such reports. The rise can be “mainly explained by the emergence of fake websites meant to mislead potential investors”, the CSSF said.
The Luxembourg Times has a new mobile app, download here! Get the Luxembourg Times delivered to your inbox twice a day. Sign up for your free newsletters here.
