Story 380,
Just last month, UK regulators fined Citi £4.7M for 970 payments that breached Russia sanctions between 2022 and 2025.
Its screening missed the standard Russian corporate prefix “PAO,” and accounts tied to a sanctioned individual were never frozen.
That happened while Citi was under consent orders requiring it to fix its controls environment.
Despite the CLO’s recent pride in Citi’s compliance progress, the sanctions program is clearly still falling short.
Hiring the former head of both OFAC and FinCEN looks like Citi admitting it needs serious firepower to fix it.
The real question naturally is whether one senior hire can do what years of consent orders haven’t. I think we know the answer.