While it has avoided the mortgage woes that have bedeviled the nation's biggest financial institutions, it has come under scrutiny because of accusations that it and other custody banks shortchanged clients when executing currency trades for foreign transactions.
Over the past year, soldiers have been grumbling about their wages, which have had trouble keeping pace with the inflation that followed a clumsily executed currency conversion from the Guinea-Bissau peso to the CFA franc, the currency of French-speaking West Africa.
Establishing deception means finding a lie, so the complaint outlines in some detail how Mr. Johnson and Mr. Scott misled the company about the best way to execute the currency transaction and why the price of the pound seemed to be spiking around the planned time for the conversion.
The economists Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, who write frequently about North Korea, point out that this is a credible method of shoring up a weak currency; in recent years, Turkey, Romania, and Ghana have executed similar currency devaluations to give their weak currencies respectability.
They execute trades using equities, bonds, currencies, commodities, and futures.
A related partnership, meanwhile, executes foreign currency transactions to generate a gain of $100 million and a loss of the same amount.
It represents the average of prices agreed during 60 seconds' trading, and is used as a reference rate to execute a much larger set of currency deals.
Much smaller amounts would go to lawyers who blessed the techniques and to banks and currency traders who helped execute them.
Its primary business includes originating loans and guarantees, attracting deposits, trading in securities and foreign currencies, executing transfers, cash and credit card operations, and rendering other banking services to its customers.
His portrait could symbolise the manoeuvres that Italians will need to execute for their country to join Europe's single currency after 1998.
