Big international banks provide the frontline troops in the battle against financial crime, or so their bosses like to say. In the post-crisis era, battalions of compliance officers have been recruited and trained. The costs are enormous and still increasing, say the banks, but financial regulators have got what they demanded. All banks must know their clients, including where and how they got their money, and the supporting documentation has to be pristine, especially if chunky sums are moving across borders.

That’s the theory, but then there’s the practice. At Deutsche Bank, circa 2012 to 2015, the system was an underfunded shambles. The bank has been fined $630m (£506m) for “unacceptable” deficiencies in its anti-money laundering controls but the details of the affair are extraordinary. Some $10bn was transferred out of Russia through Deutsche “in a manner highly suggestive of financial crime”, says the Financial Conduct Authority.

Red flags should have been everywhere in a wheeze whereby shares were bought in roubles in Deutsche’s Moscow branch and then sold via the London office for dollars. These so-called mirror trades lacked “legitimate economic rationale”, says New York’s Department of Financial Services – the other regulator on the case. The counterparties, typically registered offshore, were always related and often linked by common beneficial owners.

Deutsche Bank fined $630m over Russia money laundering claims Read more

Most damning of all, a few Deutsche employees detected something rotten but their concerns were either ignored or allowed to fizzle out inconclusively. Traders in Moscow were told not to worry and to get on with their jobs. A senior compliance officer complained he had to “beg, borrow and steal” to receive appropriate resources.

This tale of gross incompetence at one of the world’s largest banks would be easier to understand if it had emerged from the pre-crash era of light-touch regulation. But, to repeat, the events happened as recently as 2012 to 2015, well after the hardening in the regulatory mood.

We must assume, or hope, that most other international banks fulfil their duties and that Deutsche’s systems and controls were uniquely dreadful. If not, all these fine boasts about how the banks are performing a service for the world by cleaning up the financial system aren’t worth a rouble.

Ocado chances its arm with technology

It’s an engineering triumph: a robotic arm that can pick up an apple without damaging it. The accompanying video clip suggests Ocado’s mechanical device is still about 20 times slower than the average human in performing the task but, hey, big breakthroughs can take years.

They certainly can at Ocado. The big advance that interests investors is a deal with an international customer to licence the already-deployed technology that powers Ocado’s warehouses. The online grocer first promised such a deal in 2015. It never arrived. Then 2016 came and went. And now? “We expect to sign multiple deals in multiple territories in the medium term,” says chief executive Tim Steiner, wisely avoiding defining the medium term.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ocado’s SoMa robot arm picking an apple



Maybe – just maybe – the confidence is merited this time. Ocado has its new distribution centre up and running in Andover in Hampshire, so it can display its latest technology in action rather than on the drawing board. The deal has to happen, though. The extended arrangement with Morrisons can’t sustain expectations indefinitely.

The best advert for the technology would, of course, be booming profits in Ocado’s core business of delivering groceries in the UK. On that score, progress is mixed. Revenues rose almost 15% in the financial year to last November but profit before tax, hit by a £2.4m exceptional item, improved only 1% to £12.1m.

Ocado generates sufficient cash to open more warehouses and, it revealed, employ a remarkable 950 IT and software professionals in four countries. The concentration on technological improvement is admirable and Steiner is entitled to boast about the 50 patent applications. In the end, though, the Ocado Smart Platform is only properly smart if other companies want to pay decent money to licence it.

VW motors into a fresh pay controversy

How’s the corporate revamp at Volkswagen going? Very nicely if you are Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt, the compliance chief recruited after the great diesel emissions scandal. She will leave the carmaker after earning more than €10m for 13 months’ work.

Her departure, said VW, was prompted by “differences in the understanding of responsibilities and future operating structures within the function she leads.” Translation: there was a bust-up.

Hohmann-Dennhardt has earned her euros, apparently, because she had to be bought out of her contract at Daimler and now VW has to pay the full three years of the employment contract it signed with her.

That explains the formal mechanics of the €10bn. But it does not explain why the German carmaker, whose board was one of the most highly paid in Europe when the emissions cheating was exposed, appears to have learned nothing about how to reform remuneration after a corporate calamity.