FinCEN Files Show Criminals Moved Billions As Banks Watched

"xerxes" said
And just like the revelations from the Panama Papers, this news will fall by the wayside by tomorrow and business as usual will go on.

The banks’ laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC’s Mexican branches and “deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.”

This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the “legitimate” banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank’s teller windows. Tony Montana’s henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional “American City Bank” in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain’s most storied financial institutions.

... So you might ask, what’s the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC’s position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we’re talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you’re the prosecutor, you’ve got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?

How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they’ve ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby’s auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don’t think twice. And then throw them in jail.

Sound harsh? It does, doesn’t it? The only problem is, that’s exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... ke-230696/

In 2012, London-based HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, signed a deferred prosecution deal and admitted it had laundered at least $881 million for Latin American drug cartels.

Under the deal with prosecutors, HSBC paid $1.9 billion and the government agreed to put criminal charges against the bank on hold and dismiss them after five years if HSBC kept its pledge to aggressively fight the flow of dirty money.

http://www.icij.org http://www.icij.org

During that five-year probationary period, the FinCEN Files show, HSBC continued to move money for questionable characters, including suspected Russian money launderers and a Ponzi scheme under investigation in multiple countries.

Yet the government allowed HSBC to announce in December 2017 that it had “lived up to all of its commitments” under its deferred prosecution pact — and that prosecutors were dismissing the criminal charges for good.

In a statement to ICIJ, HSBC declined to answer questions about specific customers or transactions. HSBC said ICIJ’s information is “historic and predates” the end of its five-year deferred prosecution deal. During that time, the bank said, it “embarked on a multi-year journey to overhaul its ability to combat financial crime. . . . HSBC is a much safer institution than it was in 2012.”

In interviews with ICIJ and BuzzFeed, more than a dozen former compliance officers at HSBC called into question the effectiveness of the bank’s anti-money-laundering programs. Some said the bank didn’t give them enough time to do much beyond cursory looks at large flows of cash — and that when they requested information about who was behind big transactions, HSBC branches outside the U.S. often ignored them.

“They would say: ‘Sure, we’ll get back to you.’ But they’d never get back,” recalls Alexis Grullon, who monitored international suspicious activity for HSBC in New York from 2012 to 2014.

Inside big banks, systems for sniffing out illicit cash flows rely on overworked, under-resourced staffers, who typically work in back offices far from headquarters and have little clout within their organizations. Documents in the FinCEN Files show compliance workers at major banks often resort to basic Google searches to try to learn who’s behind transfers involving hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a result, the secret documents show, banks frequently file suspicious activity reports only after a transaction or customer becomes the subject of a negative news article or a government inquiry — usually after the money is long gone.