Banks from Cayman to Switzerland caught up in FIFA scandal

| 22/06/2015 | 1 Comment

Cayman News Service(CNS Business): The Cayman branch of Fidelity is just one of many banks around the world that have now been caught up in the various FIFA corruption investigations, calling the already distrusted global banking system into question. Citibank, First Caribbean and HSBC are just some named in the US indictment outlining the corruption case against a number of FIFA officials, including Cayman’s Jeffrey Webb and several sports marketing executives.

Bank of America, Barclays, Julius Baer and UBS have also been named and the Swiss authorities, who are undertaking their own probe into the footballing body HQ’d in Switzerland, now say some 53 accounts directly involved in the criminal case are based at banks in Zürich.

The football saga is having a negative impact on the already beleaguered and mistrusted international financial sector. The worldwide financial supranational watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, issued a statement about the banking sector’s failure to scrutinize corruption sufficiently but has since withdrawn the comment.

Reuters reported Monday that the anti-money-laundering international body issued a press release last week saying banks have not done enough to police suspicious financial activity by football officials and warned them to step up scrutiny but pulled the release because of the probe.

FATF President Roger Wilkins told Reuters said the statement had been removed from the website over concerns about its phrasing and a lack of concrete evidence to support the claims.

“We don’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations and the way it’s phrased could be misconstrued,” he said. “We don’t have any direct evidence that financial institutions have done necessarily anything wrong or failed to do anything in relation to these things.”

As the football scandal continues to dominate the headlines, Cayman’s football boss, Jeffrey Webb, who was temporarily removed from his job as president of CIFA and CONCACAF and VP of FIFA following his arrest last month in Zürich, is still in jail in Switzerland fighting extradition to the US.

Webb and dozens of other FIFA bosses and sports executives caught up in the worldwide corruption scandal and investigation in both the US and Switzerland are accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes over the last two decades in relation to marketing and promotion, as well as tournament bids.

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Category: Finance, Financial Crime

Comments (1)

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  1. Wix says:

    Let’s say all banks were caught up in the FIFA scandal. There is nothing in this that is just unique to Cayman. Could title this ( FIFA fraud and graft planned and hatched in the USA.) Delware companies and US banks complacent in due diligence.

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