Bancrédito International Bank & Trust Corp.

Company Profile

Founded by Julio Herrera Velutini

San Juan, Puerto Rico · Private & international banking · In liquidation since January 2023

About Bancrédito International Bank & Trust Corp.

Bancrédito International Bank & Trust Corp. was a San Juan, Puerto Rico-based international bank founded by Julio Herrera Velutini, who was its ultimate owner. The bank offered private and international banking services, and its holding structure also encompassed the Bancrédito Foundation and Bancrédito Financial Services. In 2016, the wider Bancrédito group acquired Consultiva Wealth Management, an SEC-registered investment adviser with offices in Puerto Rico and New York.

In early 2019, Puerto Rico's Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF), which regulates financial institutions on the island, opened an examination of the bank. That regulatory scrutiny later became central to the 2022 US federal bribery indictment of Herrera Velutini and then-Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced, who prosecutors alleged agreed to remove OCIF's commissioner and install a replacement favoured by Herrera Velutini in exchange for campaign support.

OCIF fined the bank over failures to enforce anti-money-laundering rules and, in January 2023, ordered it into liquidation. Lawyers for Bancrédito's holding company told reporters that the transactions regulators had flagged as suspicious had legitimate business purposes. The liquidation proceedings subsequently became the subject of a separate dispute over the disposition of an art collection connected to Herrera Velutini that had been held as collateral.

Key Facts

• Founder & ultimate owner — Julio Herrera Velutini.
• Regulator — Puerto Rico's Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF).
• Outcome — Fined over anti-money-laundering compliance failures; placed into liquidation in January 2023.
• Related entity — Consultiva Wealth Management, an SEC-registered adviser acquired by the group in 2016.

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