Financial sanctions announced by the CSSF for 2019 reached €1.76m, according to its annual report released on Friday. This is an amount three times lower than that accounted for in 2018, where the sanctions announced in connection with banks, investment companies, specialised professional service providers and support, investment fund managers and audit companies had reached €5.8m.

In detail, the sanctions imposed with regards to banks have resulted in fines close to €734,000 compared to €4.67m one year earlier.  

However, investment firms were significantly more sanctioned in 2019: total sanctions quadrupled to close to €420,000, while they doubled for investment fund managers at around €250,000, while specialised professional service providers went from zero financial sanctions in three cases in 2019 for a total of around €180,000. 

Finally, although the CSSF's turnover remained fairly stable at around €124m, the net result was €4.5 million loss, compared to the 14.9m profit it saw one year earlier. The financial centre watchdog has seen an increase in charges at all levels, including staff costs (+12%) which reached, in 2019, a total of €98.6m.

This article was originally published in French on Paperjam.lu and has been translated and edited for Delano.