The Hague Court of Appeal (Gerechtshof Den Haag) has closed the door on further prosecution of former ING chief executive Ralph Hamers, ending a long-running fight over the bank’s earlier anti-money-laundering failures.
Ralph Adrianus Joseph Gerardus Hamers (born 25 May 1966) is a Dutch businessman who was the chief executive officer (CEO) of UBS Group from September 2020 to April 2023. He was the CEO of Dutch bank ING Group from October 2013 until June 2020.
Prosecutors asked the court to halt additional criminal proceedings, and judges agreed, saying the current case file and prevailing case law make a conviction unlikely.
ING settled with the Public Prosecution Service (OM) in 2018 for €775 mn after investigators determined the bank’s AML controls fell short. At that time, the OM declined to charge Hamers, according to NL Times.
Financial activist Pieter Lakeman challenged that choice and persuaded the same Court of Appeal in 2020 to order a full investigation and possible prosecution of the former CEO.
It set off years of inquiries, and by late last year the OM concluded it still lacked enough evidence to bring a case.
The court now sees no reason to extend the process, stressing that another round of prosecution would burden the OM and the judiciary.
Judges also pointed to Hamers’ private interests, a nod to how long the matter has hung over him. Yet they noted that their 2020 order to investigate had value on its own, signalling that bank leaders can’t simply shrug off oversight failures tied to serious compliance breaches.
Lakeman calls the reversal disappointing. He says it’s hard to square the court’s current stance with its earlier directive and argues that a conviction, even without prison time, would have sent a message to Dutch boardrooms about executive accountability.
According to our data, the debate won’t disappear soon because the case became a touchstone for how far prosecutors should push when senior banking leaders preside over major AML lapses.
