Ritu Singh, a compliance executive at Santander Bank, didn’t take the usual path to her power position.
Before getting the job earlier this year, the 47-year-old banker was disbarred for “misappropriating client funds” and headed up the legal department for a company that pushed “male enhancement” pills, The Post has learned.
And for a banking executive charged with keeping Santander’s traders across 30 trading desks on their toes and up to speed regarding the 900-page Volcker rule, Singh appears to have gotten sloppy in describing her employment history on social media.
For example, Singh’s LinkedIn profile says that she has worked at Royal Bank of Canada from 2003 to the present. But a spokeswoman for the bank said she worked there from 2007 to 2011.
Singh feels her unusual path to becoming a compliance officer doesn’t mean she can’t excel at her job.
“I’m not a lawyer, I’m a compliance officer,” Singh told The Post during a brief phone conversation. “I’m not doing any [legal] activity.” The bank was aware when they hire Singh that she had been disbarred, she said.
While not all compliance officers are lawyers, hiring a disbarred lawyer accused of a financial crime is “highly irregular,” Mitch Kraskin, founder and chief executive of Compliance Science, a compliance tech company, told The Post.
“The questions you might ask are, what kind of message does this send about the culture of compliance? Who are the leaders of creating that culture? Is this individual someone who could do that?” Kraskin said.
Singh’s hiring comes amid a compliance officer hiring binge. Banks, faced with a raft of new regulations, have been recruiting these in-house watchdogs like mad — making the position one of the fastest-growing in the financial services sector.
Compliance officers are the official eyes and ears of a bank — often listening in on traders’ phone calls, scrutinizing deals, and reading through company e-mails. Their job, in short, is to keep banks from getting slapped with billion-dollar fines.
‘Compliance managers are responsible for ensuring that businesses are operating within the regulatory framework… They do not need a license to practice law in order to do so.’
- Nancy Orlando, Santander Bank spokeswoman
Singh, who used to advise Santander while working for KPMG, the accounting titan, was banned from practicing law in New Jersey and Washington, DC, in 2011 because she “knowingly misappropriated client funds,” according to legal records.
While Singh claims she doesn’t give legal advice, co-workers told The Post she has given fellow employees legal insight into the complex Volcker rule.
“[Singh] always said she is an attorney, practiced in some real estate law firm before, and she gave advice from legal perspective in all our meetings,” a Santander source told The Post.
For an unspecified period of time, Singh headed the legal department of Quest for Life, whose “male enhancement” pills promise to “increase size and girth” and to provide “mind blowing orgasms.”
While still listed on the company’s Web site as being its chief counsel, a Quest for Life rep told The Post that she no longer works there.
Santander seems to be happy with her performance — and her past.
“Compliance managers are responsible for ensuring that businesses are operating within the regulatory framework,” Nancy Orlando, a spokeswoman for the bank said in a statement. “They do not need a license to practice law in order to do so.”
Singh, a 1997 graduate of Touro College’s law school, went to New York University for college. She didn’t return follow-up calls for comment.