The appeal of a former executive of PKB Privatbank against the Swiss financial regulator was rejected. The overseer had censured him in connection with a Brazilian corruption scandal.
A Swiss court has rejected the appeal by Ferdinando Coda Nunziante, who was responsible for private banking and asset management at Lugano-based PKB, against sanctions imposed on him by Swiss regulator Finma over the Odebrecht-Petrobras scandal in Brazil, investigative portal «Gotham City» (behind paywall, in French) reported.
Odebrecht, Latin America’s largest construction corporation, was one of the companies caught up in Operacao Lava Jato, Brazil's corruption probe into state-owned oil and gas company Petrobras. Dozens of companies admitted paying bribes to politicians and officials to win contracts with Petrobras.
Sacked After Scandal
At the beginning of 2018, Finma ruled that PKB had seriously broken the rules on money laundering in connection with Odebrecht and Petrobras and fined it 1.3 million Swiss francs ($1.45 million).
In March the same year, Finma opened an investigation into Nunziante who had been responsible for developing PKB’s Latin American business and was fired in 2017 when the Lava Jato scandal broke. In October 2019, the regulator ruled that he had repeated and seriously neglected his duties in supervising the management of Latin American clients.
Causal Link Case
The regulator banned him from being a director of a financial institute for three years and ordered him to pay 30,000 francs in costs. Nunziante couldn't immediately be reached by finews.com. A spokesman for PKB declined to comment.
Nunziante had appealed to the Federal Administrative Court on the grounds that the conditions for the ban were not met because there was no causal link between the bank’s infractions of the rules and his behavior.
