JPMorgan Chase has hired the Asia head of the International Monetary Fund for a newly created senior regulatory role in the region, according to a copy of an internal memo sent Thursday.
Anoop Singh, who before working at the IMF had served in senior advisory roles at the World Bank and at India's central bank, will start at JPMorgan in Hong Kong in early February as the head of regulatory strategy and policy for the Asia-Pacific region, the memo said.
The appointment comes as JPMorgan deals with a continuing bribery investigation in the US over whether it hired the children of Chinese officials to obtain deals, and at a time when Asian financial hubs are imposing more stringent demands on banks operating in the region.
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Singh "will focus on developing adaptive strategies for our complex and dynamic regulatory environment," Tim Ryan, JPMorgan's global head of regulatory strategy and policy, and Andrew Butcher, the chief administrative officer for the bank's Asia-Pacific region, wrote in the memo.
"Our goal is to ensure we are engaged in an active and coordinated dialogue with lawmakers and regulators across Asia Pacific advocating for our clients and our businesses throughout the cycle of policy-making, legislative and regulatory implementation processes."
Singh has led the IMF in Asia since November 2008, according to his biography on the fund's website, and before that spent six years as the director of its Western Hemisphere department. During his time at the fund, he worked on macroeconomic and crisis-management issues, including leading missions to Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, according to the memo.
Singh has taught at Georgetown University in Washington and Bombay University, and holds postgraduate degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics.
In his new role at JPMorgan, Singh will work closely with the bank's government relations, legal and compliance teams, according to the memo, the contents of which were confirmed by a spokeswoman for the bank in Hong Kong.
The appointment was first reported by The Financial Times.
JPMorgan has had to pay about $20 billion in regulatory fines over the past year amid a barrage of legal actions by the United States government, including most recently a record $1.7 billion fine announced Tuesday for felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act in failing to report the suspicious activities of Bernard L Madoff when he was running his Ponzi scheme.
The investigation into the bank's hiring practices in China began last spring, and the United States authorities have since expanded the inquiry to include hiring at other big banks. Those include Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS. Neither JPMorgan nor any of the other banks have been accused of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong's securities regulator has said that it will hold banks criminally liable for any false information in disclosures made by companies that they are helping to list on the city's stock exchange. Last year, Singapore censured 20 of the world's biggest banks for attempts to manipulate local benchmark interest rates, part of a larger rate-rigging scandal being investigated by global regulators. And the authorities in Japan last month arrested a Deutsche Bank employee on bribery charges.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
