Riggs Bank

Riggs Bank, which employed on of President Bush’s uncles and its parent company have agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge and pay a $16 million fine for failing to prevent potential money laundering at the District bank, according to sources close to the matter.
The investigation focused for more than a year on Riggs's longtime specialty in diplomatic and international banking. In May, Riggs and its holding company agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty as part of an agreement with federal bank regulators stemming from its handling of accounts and apparent money laundering officials of the governments of Saudi Arabia, Chile and Equatorial Guinea.
Riggs and its holding company, Riggs National Corp., has plead guilty to one count of failing to file suspicious activity reports. Those documents are required to submit to law enforcement authorities when officers are aware of questionable activity involving a client.
The failure to file such a report is the most basic violation of law.
The agreement includes descriptions of transactions with officials of Equatorial Guinea including its dictator president. It also details the activities of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who conducted business at Riggs under assumed names.
Riggs may be sold to PNC in Pennsylvania. If the sale continues under the current terms the Allbritton, who own most of it, will walk away with nearly 300 million dollars.
The small size of the Riggs fine is a suprise.
"I had expected it to be larger," said an analyst, "I had heard numbers bandied about as high as $100 million."
A source familiar with the deal said the negotiations with the Justice Department were affected by a lot of different things. It appears apparent that the most important item was the embarrassing position of President Bush’s uncle – who is apparently in a position to reap a financial reward similar in many ways to the deal that made the President his first few million dollars. That was a questionable stock deal whereby he was able to sell his stock just before the price fell. No wrongdoing was proved in that case and apparently no wrongdoing will be investigated in this case as the Justice Department commences to seal records and put the case of sight – and they hope – out of the mind of honest, hardworking Americans.