Word: citibank
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...Citibank's private-banking unit holds more than $100 billion, which makes it about the same size as the entire bank was in 1982. Those funds are in turn part of a $17 trillion global pool of money belonging to what bankers euphemistically call "high-net-worth individuals"--a pool that generates more than $150 billion a year in banking revenue. The numbers are especially impressive when you consider that except at a few sleepy British and Swiss institutions, the private-banking industry didn't exist until the 1980s. Citibank predicted early this year that it would reach $1 trillion...
...most large banks and brokerages in the western hemisphere have moved into some form of private banking, with Citibank using its peerless retail network to develop business among local elites around the world. Most of the private-banking departments offer trusts and accounts in Switzerland, the Caymans and other havens with tight bank-secrecy laws. (An ad for Citibank's Monaco private bank touts its "trust companies and private investment companies in the U.S., Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Jersey or Switzerland" that "can give the client confidence that their assets are held...in a way that is both tax-efficient...
...perhaps no surprise that in such an intensely competitive business, some of the newer private banks are running into trouble. Citibank was only one of several private banks that, according to investigators, could have more strictly observed a central tenet that private bankers call KYC. It stands for "Know Your Customer...
...problem for Amy Elliott at Citibank was not so much what she did but whom she did it for--at least in the view of the Mexican authorities who have brought criminal charges against Raul Salinas. In addition to getting Salinas Broadway theater tickets and managing his portfolio, she employed sophisticated asset-concealment techniques on his behalf. These techniques are used quite legally by wealthy individuals--say, a surgeon who wants to secure her life savings from potential malpractice suits or an estranged husband. Elliott was helping Salinas conceal his large transfers out of the country ostensibly because...
...GWYNNE was in Huntsville, Texas, covering the search for an escaped convict when he got word from Washington correspondent Adam Zagorin that the General Accounting Office was releasing a report on Citibank's relationship with an accused murderer. For four months, Gwynne, a former banker and TIME's Austin bureau chief, had been investigating private banking, traveling around the U.S. and to Switzerland to track down money trails, so he rushed back to Austin to begin writing. "This story evolved in a perfect way," he says. "We researched a good idea for months, and when a news peg finally came...