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TD Bank to pay
$3 billion in historic money-laundering settlement
WASHINGTON | TD Bank will pay approximately $3 billion in a historic settlement with U.S. authorities who said Thursday that the financial institution’s lax practices allowed significant money laundering over multiple years.
Canada-based TD Bank pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, the largest bank in U.S. history to do so, Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
“TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crime to flourish,” Garland said. “By making its services convenient for criminals, it became one.”
High-level executives were alerted to serious problems with the bank’s anti-money laundering program, but failed to correct them as employees openly joked about how easy it seemed to be for criminals to launder money there, Garland said.
The bank is the 10th largest in the United States, and its CEO said the company takes full responsibility and has been cooperating with the investigation. It’s been taking steps to fix its U.S. anti-money laundering program, including appointing new leadership and adding hundreds of new specialists, said TD Bank Group CEO Bharat Masrani.
“We know what the issues are, we are fixing them. As we move forward, we’re ensuring that this never happens again,” Masrani said. “And I’m 100% confident that we get to the other side and emerge even stronger.”
The Justice Department said the bank allowed at least three different money laundering networks to move a total of $670 million through TD Bank accounts over a period of several years.
The institution became the bank of choice for multiple criminals and money laundering organizations, authorities said.
“From fentanyl and narcotics trafficking, to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank’s chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.
In one case, a man moved more than $470 million in drug proceeds and other illicit funds through TD Bank branches, bribing employees with more than $57,000 in gift cards.
He chose TD Bank because it had the “most permissive policies,” more than once depositing more than $1 million in cash in a single day and then moving the funds out of the bank with checks or wire transfers, Garland said. It continued despite employees expressing concern about what he was doing.
There were also piles of cash dumped on a bank’s counters and ATM withdrawals that totaled 40 times to 50 times higher than the daily limits, said Philip Sellinger, U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
In a separate scheme, five employees worked with criminal organizations to open and maintain accounts that were used to launder $39 million to Colombia, including drug proceeds, Garland said.
There were also multiple red flags in that case, including that the same Venezuelan passports were used to open multiple accounts, but the bank did not identify the problem until one of the employees was arrested.
In a third scheme, a money laundering network had accounts for at least five shell companies that moved more than $100 million in illicit funds, but the bank did not file a required suspicious activity report until law enforcement alerted it.
The bank’s “long-term, pervasive, and systemic deficiencies” in its policies over a period of nine years allowed such abuses to flourish, prosecutors said.
Two dozen people have been prosecuted for involvement in money-laundering schemes, including two TD Bank employees, Garland said. The investigation is ongoing.
The bank has also agreed to major restructuring of the corporate compliance program in its U.S. operations, as well as three years of monitoring and five years of probation.
Company recalls nearly 10 million pounds of meat and poultry dishes
A company is recalling nearly 10 million pounds of meat and poultry products made at an Oklahoma plant because they may be contaminated with listeria bacteria that can cause illness and death.
BrucePac of Woodburn, Oregon, recalled the roughly 5,000 tons of ready-to-eat foods this week after U.S. Agriculture Department officials detected listeria in samples of poultry during routine testing. Further tests identified BrucePac chicken as the source. The recall includes 75 meat and chicken products.
The foods include products like grilled chicken breast strips that were made at the company’s facility in Durant, Oklahoma. They were produced between June 19 and Oct. 8 and shipped to restaurants, food service vendors and other sites nationwide, government officials said.
The products have a best-by date of June 19, 2025 to Oct. 8, 2025. Officials said they are concerned that the foods may still be available for use or stored in refrigerators or freezers. The products should be thrown away, they added.
There are no confirmed reports of illness linked to the recall.
Eating foods contaminated with listeria can cause potentially serious illness. About 1,600 people are infected with listeria bacteria each year in the U.S. and about 260 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Listeria infections typically cause fever, muscle aches and tiredness and may cause stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance and convulsions. Symptoms can occur quickly or to up to 10 weeks after eating contaminated food. The infections are especially dangerous for older people, those with weakened immune systems or who are pregnant.
Disney World and other Orlando parks to reopen Friday
ORLANDO, Fla. | Florida theme parks including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando and SeaWorld planned to reopen Friday after an assessment of the effects of Hurricane Milton.
Some Halloween special events won’t be offered and they won’t necessarily be fully functioning Friday, but the public is welcome back, the parks said in statements.
As Milton came ashore as a major storm Wednesday, all three Orlando-based parks shut down, putting a damper on the vacations of tens of thousands of tourists, many of whom hunkered down in hotels. Disney World, Universal and SeaWorld were all closed for at least part of Wednesday and all of Thursday.
Orlando International Airport, Florida’s busiest, planned to resume domestic arrivals on Thursday and departures Friday after mostly shutting down Wednesday.
The airport’s closure prevented Simon Forster, his wife and their two children from returning to Scotland, so they enjoyed an extra two days of their two-week vacation on the bustling International Drive in Orlando’s tourism district on Thursday. Hurricanes seem to follow them since two years ago Hurricane Ian kept them from returning to Scotland after another Orlando vacation.
“Last night, it was quite intense, Forster said. “I was watching the palm trees sway back and forth outside my hotel room. How they didn’t come down, I don’t know. Scary stuff.”
Their hotel at Universal Orlando Resort had a party atmosphere Wednesday night ahead of Milton’s arrival.
“The bar was good fun,” he said. “Two extra days here, there are are worst places we could be.”
In Tampa, the animals were safe at popular tourist attractions ZooTampa and The Florida Aquarium, which were aiming to reopen Saturday.
The 1,000 animals at the zoo will remain in their night houses and hurricane shelter locations while habitats are cleared of debris, a spokesperson said. The aquarium also confirmed their animals are “doing well.”
“Our buildings weathered the storm well, as did our animals,” Roger German, president and CEO of the aquarium said in a Thursday news release.
The zoo sustained some damage from the high winds and does not have power, and the spokesperson anticipates the debris cleanup and restoration, which is already underway, will take a few days.
In Orlando, miniature golf was among the few activities available to tourists who had been locked down in their hotel rooms and rental condos with the parks closed. There was a line getting into Congo River Golf on International Drive.
Craig Greig of Glasgow, Scotland, would have been at the Magic Kingdom with his wife and 10-year-old if the theme parks had been open. Instead he was clutching a putter ready to putt golf balls over a man made lagoon filled with baby alligators.
“We just wanted to stretch our legs and get out of the hotel,” he said. “Especially for the little one.” He slept through the night as the hurricane, his first, roared through central Florida.
Disney World, Universal and other attractions make Orlando the United States’ most visited destination, drawing 74 million tourists last year alone.
And Halloween-related celebrations have made October one of the busiest and most lucrative stretches.
Hurricanes in the Orlando area are uncommon but not unheard of. Three crossed the area in 2004 – Charley, Frances and Jeanne, and Hurricane Ian caused some flooding as it plowed through as a downgraded tropical storm in 2022.
U.S. jobless claims hit 258,000, the most in a year
The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits last week jumped to its highest level in a year, which analysts are saying is more likely a result of Hurricane Helene — and the Boeing machinist strike — than a broader softening in the labor market.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for jobless claims jumped by by 33,000 to 258,000 for the week of Oct. 3. That’s the most since Aug. 5, 2023 and well above the 229,000 analysts were expecting.
Analysts highlighted big jumps in jobless benefit applications last week across states that were most affected by Hurricane Helene, including Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
“Claims will likely continue to be elevated in states affected by Helene and Hurricane Milton as well as the Boeing strike until it is resolved,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist of Oxford Economics. “We think, though, that the Fed will view these impacts as temporary and still expect it to lower rates by (25 basis points) at the November meeting.”
Venden Houten said that Washington state was the most impacted by the Boeing strike and accounted for a disproportionate share of the increase.
Applications for jobless benefits are widely considered representative of U.S. layoffs in a given week, however they can be volatile and prone to revision.
The four-week average of claims, which evens out some of that weekly volatility, rose by 6,750 to 231,000.
The total number of Americans collecting jobless benefits rose by 42,000 to about 1.86 million for the week of Sept. 28, the most since late July.
Outside of the weather and labor strife, some recent labor market data has suggested that high interest rates may finally be taking a toll on the labor market.
In response to weakening employment data and receding consumer prices, the Federal Reserve last month cut its benchmark interest rate by a half of a percentage point as the central bank shifts its focus from taming inflation toward supporting the job market. The Fed’s goal is to achieve a rare “soft landing,” whereby it brings down inflation without causing a recession.
It was the Fed’s first rate cut in four years after a series of rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 pushed the federal funds rate to a two-decade high of 5.3%.
Inflation has retreated steadily, approaching the Fed’s 2% target and leading Chair Jerome Powell to declare recently that it was largely under control.
In a separate report Thursday, the government reported that U.S. inflation reached its lowest point since February 2021.
During the first four months of 2024, applications for jobless benefits averaged just 213,000 a week before rising in May. They hit 250,000 in late July, supporting the notion that high interest rates were finally cooling a red-hot U.S. job market.
In August, the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added 818,000 fewer jobs from April 2023 through March this year than were originally reported. The revised total was also considered evidence that the job market has been slowing steadily, compelling the Fed to start cutting interest rates.
Despite some signs of labor market slowing, America’s employers added a surprisingly strong 254,000 jobs in September, easing some concerns about a weakening job market and suggesting that the pace of hiring is still solid enough to support a growing economy.
Last month’s gain was far more than economists had expected, and it was up sharply from the 159,000 jobs that were added in August. After rising for most of 2024, the unemployment rate dropped for a second straight month, from 4.2% in August to 4.1% in September.
—From AP reports
