Agricultural Bank of China has agreed to pay a $215 million penalty for falsifying transaction documents involving China and Russia and trying to cover up dollar trades with sanctioned Middle East countries, a New York bank regulator announced on Friday. The New York State’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) said Friday that officials with the Chinese bank’s New York branch were found to have obscured US dollar transactions that might reveal violations of sanctions or anti-money laundering laws, Caixin reports. Bank officials also silenced a whistleblower in the bank and their actions led to the officer’s resignation in 2015, the DFS said. Compliance personnel at the Chinese bank discovered that certain invoices involving China and Russia appeared to have been counterfeit or falsified.
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