July 15, 2016
As part of its campaign against money laundering, the Bank of Russia is taking a page from the playbooks of regulators in the U.S. and Europe. It’s now planning to reduce the reporting requirements on lenders while increasing the punishment for getting caught, Deputy Governor Dmitry Skobelkin said in an interview in Moscow. With the closures, the number of banks suspected of a large share of dubious transactions has fallen to five at the end of the first quarter from 150 in mid-2013, Skobelkin said.
The regulator defines “dubious operations” as fake trades or loans used to move money abroad.Under new rules that may go into effect within a year, banks will no longer be mandated to report client deals related to leasing and real estate or settlements, Skobelkin said. There are more than 200,000 related notifications a year. Russia’s anti-money laundering authority, Rosfinmonitoring, said it received over 9 million statements from banks last year, up from 6.9 million in 2014.
