The French trial court issued its judgment on the cross-border matter finding UBS AG and UBS (France) SA guilty of illicit solicitation and laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud and assessed a penalty of EUR 3.7 billion and EUR 15 million respectively and civil damages of EUR 800 million. UBS strongly disagrees with the verdict. The bank has consistently contested any criminal wrongdoing in this case throughout the investigation and during the trial. The conviction is not supported by any concrete evidence, but instead is based on the unfounded allegations of former employees who were not even heard at the trial.

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Estonia is investigating allegations linking Swedbank to suspicious transactions in the country involving Danske Bank, Estonia’s state prosecutor said on Wednesday. Estonian branch. A Swedish television program said it had uncovered documents indicating at least 40 billion Swedish crowns ($4.30 billion) had been transferred between accounts at Swedbank and Danske in the Baltics between 2007 and 2015. “We can confirm that, as the published information relates to Danske Bank, we are checking out the claims as part of our Danske investigation,” a spokeswoman at Estonia’s state prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday. The Estonian Financial Supervisory Authority said Danske had not operated in isolation in the financial system and that its transactions necessarily involved banks in other EU countries, not all of which were suspect.

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Commissioner for Regional Policy Corina Crețu and Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Vytenis Andriukaitis have brought together health professionals to kick-start the reflection on future EU investments in health under the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy programmes. The Commissioners launched a pilot project to improve cross-border emergency services in the Pyrenees between the border regions of France, Spain and the Principality of Andorra. They also announced that health will be this year’s new category for the RegioStars Awards.
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In a case brought by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Manraj Virdee was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to a 2 year prison sentence suspended for 2 years and he was further ordered to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work in the community. The sentence followed earlier guilty pleas to 4 charges relating to misleading consumers, fraud and the illegal operation of an unauthorised investment scheme worth over half a million pounds.
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The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a report on FinTech and market structure in financial services. The publication is part of the FSB’s ongoing work to monitor FinTech market developments and their potential implications for financial stability. The FSB defines FinTech as technology-enabled innovation in financial services that could result in new business models, applications, processes or products with an associated material effect on the provision of financial services.
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The European Central Bank (ECB) has launched a sensitivity analysis of liquidity risk to assess the ability of the banks it directly supervises to handle idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. The exercise will constitute the supervisory stress test of 2019. The results of the exercise will feed into the ECB’s ongoing supervisory assessments of banks’ liquidity risk management frameworks, including the Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP). However, the outcome of the stress test will not affect supervisory capital and liquidity requirements in a mechanical way.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed insider trading charges against a former senior attorney at Apple whose duties included executing the company’s insider trading compliance efforts. The SEC’s complaint alleges that Gene Daniel Levoff, an attorney who previously served as Apple’s global head of corporate law and corporate secretary, received confidential information about Apple’s quarterly earnings announcements in his role on a committee of senior executives who reviewed the company’s draft earnings materials prior to their public dissemination.

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The Financial Stability Board (FSB) today published the Global Monitoring Report on Non-Bank Financial Intermediation 2018. The report presents the results of the FSB’s eighth annual monitoring exercise that assesses global trends and risks from non-bank financial intermediation. It covers data up to end-2017 from 29 jurisdictions, which together represent over 80% of global GDP.
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The number of significant institutions that will be directly supervised by the European Central Bank (ECB) from 1 January 2019 stands at 119 following the annual review of significance and ad hoc assessments. The changes in significance statuses are the result of new group structures, license withdrawals, mergers and other developments. Several large banking groups have also relocated their activities to the euro area. This has increased the overall complexity and size of directly supervised banks.
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Author: Dina-Perla Portnaar

I sat across a director of an executive search and leadership company, talking about secure base leadership, unleashing the individual’s potential, changing the minds of the top leaders of the country and more, when he looked at me in a daring way and said: “I read so many books with theories on culture, human behavior, risks, failures and successes. In the end, the key differentiator which will lead to success is not EQ or SQ, but IQ”. This man was trying to challenge me and question the psychological-spiritual backbone I built up in the past six years. It made me think of the target-oriented, corporate, driven and masculine professional I used to be. A large part of me longed for the ‘simplicity’ of that existence, talking and acting in secular ways and focusing on knowledge, competences and skills more than anything else. Another part of me screamed: who are you kidding? You know, it is the combination that makes a difference, both short-term and long-term.

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