TD Bank Will Plead Guilty to Money-Laundering Charges in NJ Court
Toronto-Dominion Bank will plead guilty to money-laundering charges, a US Department of Justice prosecutor said in a Newark, New Jersey, courtroom on Thursday.
by Christine Dobby and David Voreacos · Financial Post(Bloomberg) — Toronto-Dominion Bank will plead guilty to money-laundering charges, a US Department of Justice prosecutor said in a Newark, New Jersey, courtroom on Thursday.
Two of the bank’s US subsidiary units intend to enter guilty pleas, the prosecutor said during a hearing before a US District judge. The charges include failing to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering program, failing to file accurate currency transaction reports and laundering monetary instruments.
The plea caps a months-long saga and multiple probes into the lender’s failure to catch money laundering at several of its US branches.
Canada’s second-largest lender has been under pressure in the US for months as criminal-justice and regulatory agencies have probed its failures to catch money laundering and other financial crimes at bank branches in multiple states including New York, New Jersey and Florida.
The investigations have already hit Toronto-Dominion hard, leaving a black mark on the end of Chief Executive Officer Bharat Masrani’s decade-long tenure and forcing the lender to scrap a $13.4 billion deal to acquire US regional bank First Horizon Corp. last year.
In recent months the bank set aside more than $3 billion to cover the fines it said it expected to pay to resolve these matters. It sold off some of its stake in Charles Schwab Corp. to offset those costs and recorded its first quarterly loss in decades in August.
Toronto-Dominion has more than 10 million US customers and almost 1,200 branches concentrated along the East Coast, and its American retail operations account for about a quarter of its revenue.
Analysts and investors have feared that TD’s growth in the US could be constrained by a cap similar to the one imposed on Wells Fargo & Co. in 2017, which limited that bank’s assets to about $1.95 trillion. Almost seven years later, Wells is still not out from under that sanction, which has been a major drag on its share price.