U.S. efforts to prevent Iran and other countries from evading international sanctions risk being undermined through the use of opaque institutional accounts held by securities brokerages, a U.S. Treasury official warned on Monday. So-called "omnibus accounts" that comprise multiple institutional accounts held by a brokerage on behalf of other individuals or clients make it hard to tell whether they contain any links to a sanctioned country, said Adam Szubin, director of Treasury's Office of Financial Assets Control. "Where we see institutions getting into trouble is when there are areas of their business models that are opaque," Szubin told a Florida conference of the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists conference. Sub-accounts "nested," or hidden within an omnibus institutional account, may be able to escape the close ownership scrutiny firms normally give their customers, Szubin said. "You're hosting business for a customer, a beneficial owner,
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