In September, 2005, anxious compliance officers at BNP Paribas summoned executives from the French bank’s Paris headquarters to an emergency summit at its offices in Geneva.
The seven-storey building by the lake housed the bank’s little known trade-finance arm, where hundreds of bankers assembled complex deals that allowed companies and countries to move oil and other commodities around the world.
The unit had been expanding fast and had become an increasingly important part of BNP’s global empire, generating billions in profits in recent years. But it had also become a concern for the people in charge of policing the bank’s dealings in a regulatorily difficult but lucrative corner of global finance.
During a tense meeting, the company’s Swiss compliance officers explained to their senior French colleagues, including Georges Chodron de Courcel, BNP Paribas’s chief operating officer, that they were troubled by transactions uncovered involving the Sudanese government, a regime blacklisted by the United States. Even though the US authorities had threatened severe punishment for anyone trading with rogue states, Chodron de Courcel stunned those in the room by dismissing the concerns and requesting that no minutes of the meeting be taken.
Last week, the consequences of ignoring those warnings finally caught up with one of the titans of Europe’s banking system. After an in-depth investigation into BNP Paribas’ activities, officials from the US Department of Justice announced that France’s biggest bank had pleaded guilty to violating sanctions for more than a decade and agreed to pay a record-breaking $9bn (£5.25bn) fine to state and federal authorities.
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