Austrian lender Raiffeisen Bank International’s CEO, Herbert Stepic, is being probed for using companies in Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to conduct property deals he did not report to the lender.
Accprding to media reports, Stepic owns a Hong Kong firm, Takego, and a BVI firm, Yatsenko International, which he used to buy three flats in Singapore. A day after officials began a probe into his investments through offshore accounts, Stepic has offered to resign, and eastern Europe’s second-biggest lender will "promptly consider" the option, according to a statement.
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Raiffeisen, with 60,000 employees and 14.2 million customers, is the only Austrian bank with offices in Asia, including Hong Kong, mainland China and Singapore, according to its website.
Hong Kong corporate registry’s investigations found Takego was owned last year by a Hong Kong firm, Lintel Securities, wholly owned by David Chong Kok Kong, the chairman of Portcullis Trustnet, a financial services firm based in Singapore, which was a major source of information on secretive offshore companies that was provided to the US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in one of the biggest financial leaks in history.
At a European Council meeting in Brussels on 22 May, to discuss fighting tax fraud by lifting bank secrecy, Austria revealed it was ready to share data on foreign depositors by the end of 2013.
The EU also called for tougher laws against money laundering to be implemented by the end of this year, as well as tighterregulations on business tax.
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