Skip to content

Exception Tracking Spreadsheet (TicklerTrax™)
Downloaded by more than 1,000 bankers. Free Excel spreadsheet to help you track missing and expiring documents for credit and loans, deposits, trusts, and more. Visualize your exception data in interactive charts and graphs. Provided by bank technology vendor, AccuSystems. Download TicklerTrax for free.

Click Now!


Credit Suisse pays $474M+ for misleading customers

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced Credit Suisse Group AG has agreed to pay nearly $475 million to U.S. and UK authorities, including nearly $100 million to the SEC, for fraudulently misleading investors and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in a scheme involving two bond offerings and a syndicated loan that raised funds on behalf of state-owned entities in Mozambique.

According to the SEC's order, these transactions that raised over $1 billion were used to perpetrate a hidden debt scheme, pay kickbacks to now-indicted former Credit Suisse investment bankers along with their intermediaries, and bribe corrupt Mozambique government officials. The SEC's order finds that the offering materials created and distributed to investors by Credit Suisse hid the underlying corruption and falsely disclosed that the proceeds would help develop Mozambique's tuna fishing industry. Credit Suisse failed to disclose the full extent and nature of Mozambique's indebtedness and the risk of default arising from these transactions.

VTB Capital plc, a London-based subsidiary of Russian bank VTB, separately agreed to pay more than $6 million to settle SEC charges related to its role in misleading investors in a second 2016 bond offering. According to the SEC's order in this case, the second offering as structured by VTB Capital and Credit Suisse allowed investors to exchange their notes in an earlier bond offering for new sovereign bonds issued directly by the government of Mozambique. But the SEC found that the offering materials distributed and marketed by Credit Suisse and VTB Capital failed to disclose the true nature of Mozambique's debt and the high risk of default on the bonds. The offering materials further failed to disclose Credit Suisse's discovery that significant funds from the earlier offering had been diverted away from the intended use of proceeds that was disclosed to investors. Mozambique later defaulted on the financings after the full extent of "secret debt" was revealed.

Filed under: 

Training View All

Penalties View All

Search Top Stories