The FSA’s £6.9m fine on Willis has pushed the regulator’s total financial penalties for the year so far up to nearly £29m, according to a new analysis.

According to consultancy Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, the FSA had issued 30 fines with a combined value of £28,652,273 by the end of July.

A jump in the figure during July was largely accounted for by the penalty on Willis, which Wolters Kluwer describes as the City regulator's largest fine to date for financial crime control failures.

But the figures also show that compared to the same period last year, the FSA has issued almost exactly half the number of fines with half the total value.

Up to the end of July 2010, 58 financial penalties had been handed out totaling £57,261,697,

Wolters Kluwer Manager for Regulatory Content, UK, Mary Stevens, said: “Although this is not an exact science it does not seem unreasonable to assume that last year’s figure of just shy of £90 million will remain in the record books for time in memorial. Should this trend continue for the remainder of 2011 then it is likely that we would see the overall fines total for this year reaching approximately £45 million making it the second largest annual figure in the FSA’s history of regulation.”

She added that the Willis fine shows that “systems and control failures clearly remain a significant bugbear for the city regulator."

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