The European Central Bank has withdrawn the banking license of Malta's Pilatus Bank, the island's financial regulator said on Monday, after the lender was accused of processing corrupt payments for senior Azeri and Maltese figures.
The accusations were made by investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed a year ago by a car bomb in Malta.
"The ECB's Governing Council has decided to withdraw the authorization of Pilatus Bank with effect from today," Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) said in a statement.
Neither the bank nor the ECB were immediately available for comment.
MFSA's recommended revoking the license in June. The decision took longer than expected due to legal hurdles, ECB officials have said, highlighting the weakness of the European Union framework for preventing and countering money laundering.
The EU began investigating the Pilatus case after Caruana Galizia's murder in October 2017, for which there is no proven link to the reports she wrote about the bank.
Maltese authorities took no action until the Iranian chairman of the bank, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, was arrested in the United States in March on charges of money laundering and sanctions violation.
After that arrest, the MFSA froze the assets of the bank and recommended the withdrawal of its license.
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