Update: ING Groep CFO Koos Timmermans Steps Down After Settlement
11 Septiembre 2018 - 3:47PM
Noticias Dow Jones
By Nina Trentmann and Mara Lemos Stein
ING Groep NV said its Chief Financial Officer Koos Timmermans is
stepping down, a week after the Dutch lender agreed to pay a record
penalty to settle an investigation on the failure of its
money-laundering controls.
Mr. Timmermans was a member of ING's management board and in
charge of its operations in the Netherlands for much of the period
covered by the investigation, ING said. Last week, the bank agreed
to pay EUR775 million ($897.2 million) to settle the investigation
by Dutch authorities on the shortcomings in its customer
due-diligence policies between 2010 and 2016.
The management change at ING comes amid increasing political
pressure for personal accountability for corporate misconduct,
analysts said. "Somebody had to go, there was a price to pay," said
Jean-Pierre Lambert, an analyst at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette
& Woods Inc.
Regulators focused on ING in part because the bank in 2008
received around EUR10 billion ($11.6 billion) of taxpayer money to
weather the global financial crisis, Mr. Lambert said. The bank
made its final repayment of the bailout money in 2014.
European regulators have been clamping down on financial
wrongdoings but are hampered by a patchwork of local legislation.
Fines imposed by European investigators since 2008 -- a total of
$1.7 billion -- have been much lower than the $23.5 billion levied
by the U.S., according to Fenergo Ltd., a consultancy firm.
Mr. Timmermans was well respected in the financial community and
his departure from ING will be a loss for the bank, Mr. Lambert
said.
Mr. Timmermans joined ING in 1996 and became its CFO last year.
He was previously made the first chief risk officer on ING's
executive board in 2007. He will remain in his post until a
replacement has been found, the bank said.
ING may need more than just a new CFO, Mr. Lambert said. "The
whole management board will have to be reshuffled," he said. "The
CEO [ Ralph Hamers] needs to be better surrounded for the running
of the bank," Mr. Lambert said.
The search for a successor might take a while because as ING
works on rebuilding its reputation, he added.
ING said there was no evidence that any of its employees
collaborated with customers using ING accounts for criminal
purposes, or benefited from the shortcomings of its
money-laundering controls. Instead, there had been a "collective"
failure across all levels, the bank said in a statement.
The investigators focused on four cases in which clients were
able to misuse their ING bank accounts. One involved Dutch-based
telecommunications company VimpelCom Ltd., which operates under the
name Veon Ltd since 2017.
Dutch prosecutors alleged the telecommunications company used
its ING bank accounts to transfer bribes worth tens of millions of
dollars to a company controlled by the daughter of the then
president of Uzbekistan. VimpelCom agreed in February 2016 to pay
$795 million in penalties to U.S. and Dutch authorities to settle a
bribery investigation.
An investigation into ING by U.S. regulators was closed last
week following the settlement in the Netherlands. The U.S.
Securities and Exchange had requested information from the bank in
relation to the investigations by the Dutch prosecutors.
Write to Nina Trentmann at Nina.Trentmann@wsj.com and Mara Lemos
Stein at mara.lemos-stein@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 11, 2018 16:32 ET (20:32 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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