Singapore has hit banks and wealth managers including UBS, Citi and Julius Baer with its second-largest collective penalty ever in relation to a money-laundering case that dented the city-state’s clean reputation and cast a pall over its wealth management sector.

Nine financial institutions received a collective penalty of S$27.45mn (US$21.5mn), the largest figure since penalties in the 1MDB case, over what Singapore’s regulator called “poor and inconsistent implementation” of controls in a US$2bn money-laundering scandal.