SINGAPORE: Fund manager Atrium Asia Investment Management has been fined S$1.9 million (US$1.4 million) for multiple violations of anti-money laundering and anti-money financing protection requirements. terrorism.

The company breached Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) requirements multiple times between June 2015 and October 2020, “putting the company at risk of being misused for financial crime”, a declared the central bank on Tuesday October 29.

A reprimand was also issued to the company’s CEO, Mintarja Oei, for failing to ensure compliance with the requirements. The company’s main violations “are attributable to Mr. Oei,” MAS said.

MAS said its inspection of Atrium Asia found its “internal policies and procedures at the material time were inadequate”.“.

Atrium Asia failed to implement adequate processes to detect and report suspicious and unusually large customer transactions with third parties and, as a result, processed many of these transactions without verifying the purported relationships between its customers and third parties.

The company also failed to properly assess the money laundering or terrorist financing risks posed by its customers, nor did it implement appropriate risk mitigation measures to address the money laundering risks linked to taxation, MAS said.

Due to the lack of internal risk management systems and procedures, Atrium Asia failed to identify several clients as politically exposed persons or their close associates and failed to apply the enhanced due diligence measures required for these customers.

Atrium Asia also did not have internal procedures in place to enable it to maintain records of the documents and information it was required to obtain from clients to meet MAS’s requirements. This resulted in the company failing to record the identity of the beneficial owners of several clients and failing to maintain its documents verifying the identity of beneficial owners.

The company “has since taken corrective action to address the deficiencies identified,” MAS said.