Africa-Press – Angola. The Angolan Bank of Commerce and Industry (BCI) acknowledged today that the sanctions applied by the regulator are aimed at the stability, integrity and resilience of the banking sector but said that the deficiencies highlighted were “inherited” from the period prior to privatization.
BCI, a former publicly-owned bank, now owned by the Carrinho business group after privatization, accepted the financial penalty imposed on it by the National Bank of Angola (BNA) due to failure to comply with certain legal procedures related to the prevention and fight against money laundering.
The banking institution, in a press release released today, says it recognizes and respects the role of the BNA as the supervisory entity of the national financial system, considering its performance to be fundamental for promoting the stability, integrity and resilience of the banking sector.
“We have cooperated continuously, transparently and proactively with the BNA, in order to ensure compliance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements,” the document reads.
The BNA imposed fines totaling more than 1.4 million euros on the banks Yetu and BCI, and a manager was also sanctioned for “serious infractions” in the area of preventing and combating money laundering.
The decisions to convict these entities for committing particularly serious offences in the misdemeanour proceedings against them were published today on the BNA website.
The heaviest fine was applied to Yetu bank, in the amount of one billion kwanzas (963 thousand euros), with the Angolan regulator considering that the institution violated its obligations of “diligence and abstention, when establishing business relations with counterparties”.
The BNA imposed a sanction of 330.4 million kwanzas (318 thousand euros) on the Banco de Comércio e Indústria (BCI) for failure to comply with risk assessment, identification and due diligence obligations, enhanced due diligence measures, as well as the obligation to abstain, within the scope of the rules and procedures for preventing and combating money laundering, financing terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
According to BCI’s management, the deficiencies identified relate to “practices and procedures inherited from a period prior to the bank’s privatization” and these were, to a large extent, associated with the need to review and update internal policies, as well as the modernization of technological systems – “aspects already flagged and in the process of being restructured since the institution’s transition to the private sector”.
Since privatization, BCI has been implementing a structured program to strengthen its corporate governance, with special attention to strengthening its compliance framework.
“The corrective measures already adopted were duly communicated and validated by the regulator, and are being fully implemented with a view to mitigating the risk of recurrence,” the note adds.
Lusa tried to contact the management of Banco Yetu but has not received any response so far.
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