Citigroup pays $10.5M for SEC violations

The SEC announced yesterday that Citigroup has agreed to pay $10.5 million in penalties to settle two enforcement actions involving its books and records, internal accounting controls, and trader supervision. The charges stem from $81 million of losses due to trader mismarking and unauthorized proprietary trading and $475 million of losses due to fraudulently-induced loans made by a Mexican subsidiary.

In the first action, Citigroup Inc. and its U.S. broker-dealer subsidiary Citigroup Global Markets Inc. (CGMI) agreed to pay a $5.75 million penalty to settle charges of inaccurate books and records and CGMI’s failure reasonably to supervise traders. Citigroup and CGMI settled without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings and agreed to cease and desist from future violations.

In the second action, Citigroup agreed to pay a $4.75 million penalty to settle charges that it failed to devise and maintain adequate internal accounting controls. Citigroup settled without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings and agreed to cease and desist from future violations. An SEC order found that Citigroup subsidiary Grupo Financiero Banamex S.A. de C.V. loaned approximately $3.3 billion to Oceanografia, S.A. (OSA) between 2008 and 2014 based on invoices and work estimates for services that OSA provided to Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the Mexican state-owned oil company. According to the order, many of the OSA work estimates were fraudulent and did not reflect amounts Pemex actually owed to OSA. Citigroup ultimately lost approximately $475 million as a result of OSA’s fraud. The SEC found that Banamex and Citigroup lacked the controls necessary to verify the invoices before making loans to OSA and ignored numerous red flags that should have led to discovery of the fraud.