UAE Central Bank Fines Bank Branch AED 1.82 Million Over Consumer-Protection Breach

The Central Bank of the UAE has fined a branch of a foreign bank operating in the country 1.82 million dirhams for a consumer-protection breach, signalling that regulators are increasingly treating administrative and conduct failures as serious offences. The penalty, imposed in early July following supervisory examinations, related to the branch's failure to issue a customer liability letter within the mandated seven-day period, a breach of the central bank's Market Conduct and Consumer Protection Regulations and Standards. The regulator did not name the institution. The action follows a series of tougher enforcement measures across the UAE financial sector, including a 20-million-dirham penalty on another foreign bank branch in June for repeated anti-money-laundering failures. It comes under a landmark new Central Bank Law that consolidated oversight of banking, insurance and payments and sharply raised the maximum administrative fine to as much as one billion dirhams, while giving the regulator stronger powers to publish decisions and recover penalties. The message to firms is that routine process failures, such as missed deadlines on customer documents, now carry real financial and reputational consequences.