Two staff members – one from Deutsche Bank’s brokerage unit and a former employee at Mitsui & Co – have been arrested in Japan in connection with ‘excessive entertainment’ spending that has drawn penalties from the country’s regulators.
Bloomberg reports that Shigeru Echigo, a director of Deutsche Securities Inc.’s pension solution sales department, is suspected of entertaining a client at a Mitsui & Co division in exchange for purchases of investment products.
The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission said the Japanese unit of Germany’s biggest bank had violated the country’s rules by providing special benefits to three pensions, spending $62,000 entertaining the clients on about 100 occasions from 2010 to 2012.
China’s bans banks from Bitcoin
Only days after the country’s largest Bitcoin trader BTC spoke about how important the nation had become to the virtual currency, China’s central bank barred financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions, Bloomberg reports.
This comes after Bitcoin’s value increased 89-fold and attracted investor attention. The central bank’s decision saw the currency plunge 20% after the People’s Bank of China said it isn’t a currency with “real meaning” and doesn’t have the same legal status.
The Financial Times reports that Beijing has not outlawed the currency altogether, saying individuals were free to buy and sell it at their own risk, but it highlighted what it said were dangers associated with it, including money laundering and criminality.
StanChart Singapore’s embarrassing data breach
Reuters reports that a hacker – now in custody – has stolen the bank statements of around 650 of Standard Chartered Plc’s private banking clients.
Singapore police said the data was found on a laptop belonging to James Raj Arokiasamy, who was already in custody after being charged last month for allegedly hacking into a local government website using the moniker “The Messiah”.
Singapore becomes a tad cheaper
Good news for expats living and working in Singapore and bad news for those in Hong Kong. According to the latest ECA International survey, Singapore is now the ninth most expensive Asian city for expatriates – the first time since 2010 it has fallen behind Hong Kong in eighth position.
The Business Times reports that the slight change is largely due to the recent weakening of the Singapore dollar against the US dollar, to which the Hong Kong currency is pegged.
Asia private banking market grows 30% in six months
New research from East & Partners shows 30% growth in the Asian private banking market since May 2013. The firm has forecast that it will grow 70% overall by November 2014, says Asian Banking & Finance.