June 16 (Reuters) - A former Citigroup executive alleged in a lawsuit that the bank sacked her after she flagged its efforts to court U.S. President Donald Trump as a client as well as its broader risk-management practices, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
The complaint, filed in a Brooklyn federal court, alleged that the bank retaliated against the former managing director in its wealth unit after she flagged what she described as several risk-management deficiencies, the report added.
The
anonymous lawsuit, filed under the pseudonym Jane Doe, said the former executive raised concerns about "know your customer" checks, the FT reported. Such checks are used by financial institutions to assess risks when taking on new clients.
"As with the other complaint filed by this plaintiff's attorney against Citi, this suit has absolutely zero merit and we'll demonstrate that through the legal process," Citigroup said in a statement.
In a redacted section, the lawsuit said the former executive raised some of the concerns as Citi was last year considering whether to open a so-called numbered account — which would have made it anonymous to most employees and therefore hard to monitor — for U.S. President Trump, the report added.
Following Trump's order last year, authorities have been cracking down on what he has characterized as politically motivated debanking pushed by Democrats, creating headaches for lenders, who deny the claims and say they have merely been following risk-management rules.
Debanking generally refers to the process whereby a financial institution suddenly cuts off or restricts services to individuals or businesses.
(Reporting by Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru and Tatiana Bautzer in New York; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
