TEL AVIV, April 1 (Reuters) - Israel's Bank Leumi is in talks with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and could be required to make payments to the watchdog over securities held by its U.S. clients, it said on Wednesday.
Leumi has already agreed to pay $400 million to the Department of Justice and New York state to settle two separate investigations into whether the bank helped its U.S. clients to evade taxes.
Though the bank's chairman David Brodet told a press briefing on Wednesday that the December settlement had lifted "a heavy cloud of uncertainty", Chief Executive Rakefet Russak Aminoach said that an issue remains over whether any laws were broken regarding securities held by Leumi's U.S. clients.
Aminoach said the bank is talking to the SEC but it is unclear whether there will be any further repercussions.
"We have no idea whether there is a matter we will have to pay for," she said.
"I can say only that if you look at all agreements made around the world in an issue similar to ours, if in the end someone paid the SEC, it was always minor and negligible compared with the size of the agreement.
"We assume that also for us, if there is (a payment), it will not be significant." (Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by David Goodman)