AMSTERDAM: ABN Amro said on Thursday that Robert Swaak, a former chairman of accounting firm PwC in the Netherlands, is to succeed Kees van Dijkhuizen as the Dutch bank’s chief executive.
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Swaak will take over from Van Dijkhuizen at the company’s annual meeting April 22, pending regulatory and shareholder approval, the bank said in a statement.
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His appointment comes as the bank is under investigation by Dutch prosecutors who allege the group failed to detect, report and prevent suspicious transactions.
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Chairman Tom de Swaan said Swaak was a seasoned veteran who would give a high priority to “improvement programmes relating to Detecting Financial Crime (DFC), promoting public-private cooperation on DFC and compliance with the growing number of rules and regulations.” Swaak, 59, said in a statement he was looking forward to the job including the challenges it would entail.
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Van Dijkhuizen has been ABN’s CEO since 2017, and was CFO when the bank returned to the stock market in 2015 after it was nationalised during the 2008 financial crisis.
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The Dutch state continues to hold a 56 per cent stake in ABN, which does the majority of its business in the Netherlands.
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The bank’s shares have fallen 23 per cent over the past year, despite a strong Dutch economy, due to falling European interest rates and worries over the size of any potential fines resulting from the money laundering investigation.
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Larger rival ING was fined $900 million in 2018 for money laundering failures.
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