The bank has hired people of various backgrounds, such as military intelligence in the US, to bolster its armoury against financial crime. This might have something to do with its recent humiliations at the hands of various prosecutors.

Standard Chartered, the London-listed bank that earns most of its revenues in regions such as Africa and Asia, has appointed three senior figures to beef up its compliance teams in different regions, including a former US military intelligence officer. The appointments are to the firm's financial crime compliance team, which is run by John Cusack.

Steve Munro, the head of sanctions compliance, is based in New York and reports to Cusack. He used to work at GE Capital where he was global anti-money-laundering leader, a job that includes responsibility for sanctions. Previously, Munro held senior financial crime positions at Société Générale and served as deputy chief counsel for the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and as a US military intelligence officer.

Carmel Speers has been earmarked as head of financial crime compliance for the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP), based in Dubai. Speers used to work for JP Morgan in the UK and has more than 25 years of professional experience. She reports to Jeremy Trevis, regional head of legal and compliance for MENAP, and to David Howes, the deputy head of financial crime compliance.

David Clark is to become the head of financial crime compliance surveillance and analysis. Like Munro, he worked at GE Capital where he was the head of international financial crime compliance. Previously, he held senior financial crime positions with Barclays, ABN Amro and HM Revenue Customs & Excise. He will be based in London, reporting to Markus Schulz, the head of financial crime controls.

In addition, Duncan Wales will join Standard Chartered in September as deputy general counsel. He will be based in London and will assist David Fein, the group's general counsel, in managing the group’s legal affairs.

Wales previously worked at ICAP, the inter-dealer brokerage firm, where he served as group general counsel from 2008 onwards. Before he held that position, he occupied a number of senior positions at ICAP, including that of director of government affairs, general counsel for EMEA and Asia and senior counsel to the electronic broking division.

Wales was director of legal affairs at BrokerTec before ICAP acquired that company in 2003. He began his career as a solicitor at Clifford Chance and served as in-house counsel at ING Barings. The banking group has said, in a rather unlettered way, that it has “taken a number of significant steps in support of its strategic priorities around financial crime”, such as forming a board-level financial crime risk committee whose members include experts in intelligence and security, law enforcement and payments processing; increasing by almost 5 times its headcount in financial crime compliance, and becoming a member of the Wolfsberg Group of International Financial Institutions and the Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce, a national financial crime prevention alliance of UK banks, policemen, law-enforcing bodies and other important governmental agencies.   

In December last year, the bank had to "eat humble pie" yet again before various American prosecutorial agencies. US officials had reopened an investigation into allegations that it had wrongly transferred billions on behalf of Iran and other countries that it should not have done according to US sanctions. Standard Chartered's humiliation took the form of a 3-year extension of the punitive terms of a so-called non-prosecution agreement (first signed in December 2012) to 10 December 2017. It signed its agreement with the US Department of Justice and the New York County District Attorney's Office.

Its 'Christmas present' to the DoJ for "the Wall Street equivalent of a parole violation," as the New York Times put it, consisted of $667 million. Only four months earlier in August, it paid the New York Department of Financial Services $300 million. Its latest appointments might be seen as a fig-leaf to cover its embarrassment.