Not for the first time, Citigroup has stepped into a mess – and by extension besmirched the financial industry. Not that Citigroup committed a crime, or colluded to set foreign exchange rates or Libor prices, say. Rather, the bank is the victim of fraud in Mexico that could cost it much as $400 million. The problem is that the lender has been cheated out of the cash in one of the most basic businesses in banking. That should worry Citigroup’s rivals, too.
Citigroup’s latest slip emerges from the usually sleepy world of accounts receivable. This is the unit that makes short-term loans while clients wait for money owed to them by other companies to arrive. In this case, by the end of 2013, Citigroup thought it had lent Oceanografia, a Mexican oil-services firm, $585 million to cover any shortfalls while it waited for the state oil company Pemex to pay some bills.
So far, so boring. It turns out, however, that a person or persons at Oceanografia falsified a whole swath of invoices to make it look as if Pemex owed them money. Employees at Banamex, Citigroup’s Mexican subsidiary, signed off on them. Citigroup, with Pemex’s help, has now worked out that only $185 million of the invoices were valid.
What’s surprising is that Banamex did not seem to suspect anything was amiss. The bank was alerted to the fraud on Feb. 11 only after Mexico banned Oceanografia from receiving new government contracts for 21 months as a result of a corruption investigation.
Fraud is a risk all companies will face forever. The size of this con and the absence of any internal red flags make it particularly notable and raise important questions. For instance, are Citigroup’s risk-management processes in this plain-vanilla business up to snuff? It was a related transaction services-type business at JPMorgan that allowed Bernard Madoff to dupe investors for years. JPMorgan wound up paying $2.6 billion to settle government investigations.
Michael Corbat, the normally mild-mannered chief executive of Citigroup, used unusually strong language in a press release, calling the fraud a “despicable crime” and promising anyone found to have aided or abetted the con, including by lax oversight, will be held “equally responsible.” Tough words are fine after the fact. Ensuring such wrongdoings are flagged earlier would be preferable.
Antony Currie is an associate editor at Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com.