Introduction

On 4 September 2018, the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service (NPPS) published a €775 million settlement with the Dutch bank ING Group NV, the largest financial services provider in the Netherlands, for serious and structural violations of the Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing (Prevention) Act (AML/CTF Act). The settlement, consisting of a fine of €675 million and a disgorgement of €100 million, is the largest ever agreed upon in the Netherlands.

The AML/CTF Act regulations require banks and other service providers to identify and prevent illicit financial flows by monitoring (potential) clients, and by signalling and reporting risks to the authorities. In other words, these service providers should act as gatekeepers to protect the integrity of the financial system; a role which ING had insufficiently fulfilled. As a result, criminals had been able to abuse ING accounts and launder large sums of money through Dutch accounts for several years.

Together with the settlement, the NPPS published an extensive statement of facts on the criminal investigation against ING (Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, 2018). The report presents a shocking picture of the bank's internal operations. Not only were client investigations not carried out properly, resulting in files being missing or incomplete, the internal risk monitoring system – which was specifically intended to pick up risks of money laundering – turned out to be capped at only three risks per day for some categories of risks (Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, 2018: 11). As a result, the bank had missed important signals of money laundering. According to the NPPS, these shortcomings were deeply rooted in the bank's corporate culture, in which cutbacks had come at the expense of compliance (Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, 2018: 17).

Around the time of the ING case, a similar case occurred in Belgium. In May 2018, the National Bank of Belgium imposed a fine of €300,000 on BNP Paribas Fortis, the largest bank in Belgium, for violations of anti-money laundering regulations (Bové and Broens, 2018). Here too, the bank failed to adequately monitor clients and transactions for many years. The former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had an account with the bank which he used to transfer more than €80,000 for the purchase of more than 1,000 bulletproof vests (Bové and Broens, 2018).

Although similar in terms of the nature and extent of the violations involved, these cases triggered completely different responses.