AUDITING GIANT PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLC GETS HIT WITH $25 MILLION FINE FOR HELPING LAUNDER TERRORIST FUNDS

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLC

Auditing giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers is getting slapped with a $25 million fine for helping a Japanese bank launder money for terrorist states like Iran, Sudan and Myanmar.

New York’s top financial services regulator is putting the screws to PwC after it aided the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi hide the true nature of the illegal transactions on a 2008 financial statement, according to a settlement between the auditor and state officials announced Monday.

A PwC board member, who is now a partner at the firm, was at the center of the scandal, The Post has learned.

PwC helped the leading Japanese bank hide its ties to the terrorist states by whitewashing the language in its audit report to make it less likely it would draw the attention of Ben Lawsky, superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, and other regulators, according to the settlement.

PwC is also suspended for two years from auditing banks under Lawsky’s supervision.

Employees who wanted to “raise an issue of data completeness at this point does not do anyone, especially the bank, any good,” the unnamed PwC director said. That director was Richard Inserro, who is now a PwC partner dealing in banking and capital markets.

“Richard has extensive experience assisting clients with the design and implementation of solutions to address regulatory and risk management issues,” according to his LinkedIn page.

Inserro didn’t return a voicemail seeking comment, and an e-mail to his work account said he was on vacation until Aug. 25.

Caroline Nolan, a spokeswoman for PwC, declined to comment on Inserro.
The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi settled last year with Lawsky’s office for $250 million.

In May 2008, the Japanese bank told PwC that it had a written policy to strip wire messages of any information that related to countries blacklisted by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, according to the settlement.

The auditors then let the bank’s lawyers dictate specific parts of the report, scrubbing any mention of any special instructions to it employees and said that the data was complete and their methodology was appropriate.

The case comes after Lawsky’s agency slammed French bank BNP Paribas with an $8.9 billion fine for laundering money to entities in Iran, Sudan and Cuba — the largest such fine for a bank.