WELLS FARGO HAS LONG BEEN THE BANKSTERS TO THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS.
WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA ARE BOTH GENEROUS DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA "THE RACE".
HSBC lax in preventing
money laundering by cartels, terrorists
NEW
YORK (CNNMoney) -- Global banking giant HSBC failed to prevent billions of
dollars worth of money transfers that Senate investigators believe were linked
to drug cartels and terrorist groups, according to a report released Monday.
The
Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said London-based HSBC (HBC)
failed to review thousands of suspicious transactions and properly vet clients
over the past decade.
Among
other issues, the report notes that in 2007 and 2008, HSBC's Mexico unit
shipped $7 billion in cash to the bank's U.S. affiliate, a volume of shipments
that law enforcement officials said could reach that size "only if they
included illegal drug proceeds."
HSBC
Mexico had a number of high-profile clients linked to drug trafficking, the
report says, as well as "a huge backlog of accounts marked for closure due
to suspicious activity, but whose closures were delayed."
The
subcommittee also found that HSBC worked extensively with Saudi Arabia's Al
Rajhi Bank, some owners of which have been linked to terrorism financing. Some
evidence suggests Al Rajhi's "key founder" was "an early
financial benefactor of al Qaeda," the report says.
HSBC's
U.S. affiliate supplied Al Rajhi with nearly $1 billion worth of U.S. banknotes
up to 2010, and also worked with two banks in Bangladesh that some evidence
links to terrorism financing as well.
"From
an oversight perspective, the failure of accountability here is dramatic,"
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the subcommittee, said Monday.
The
Department of Justice is also investigating HSBC over the issue. A DOJ
spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the ongoing probe.
The
report comes ahead of a hearing by the Senate subcommittee Tuesday that will
feature testimony from HSBC executives and government officials from the
Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency.
The
report also said HSBC's U.S. affiliate handled nearly 25,000 transactions
involving Iran between 2001 and 2007, despite U.S. sanctions against the
country. Other HSBC affiliates making transfers to the U.S. frequently stripped
information from the transactions that linked them to Iran in order to evade
scrutiny.
Some
HSBC executives in the U.S. were aware of this practice as far back as 2001,
the report says. An outside review commissioned by HSBC found nearly $20
billion worth of transactions between 2001 and 2007 that may have been subject
to U.S. sanctions.
HSBC
said in a statement ahead of the hearing that it "takes compliance with
the law, wherever it operates, very seriously."
"We
will acknowledge that, in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the
standards that regulators and customers expect," HSBC said. "We
believe that this case history will provide important lessons for the whole
industry in seeking to prevent illicit actors entering the global financial
system."
The
bank added that it has beefed up its compliance efforts over the past year,
increasing its due diligence requirements for affiliates and devoting more
resources to the issue.
The
Senate subcommittee noted that HSBC was "fully cooperative" with the
investigation, providing documents from around the world beyond what was
legally required.
HSBC
isn't the first large bank to face scrutiny over money laundering issues from
U.S. regulators and law enforcement.
Last
month, Dutch bank ING agreed to pay a $619 million
penalty for moving billions of dollars through the U.S.
financial system at the behest of Cuban and Iranian clients, acts that violated
economic sanctions.
In
2010, the former Wachovia Bank paid $160 million to resolve allegations that it
lacked robust anti-money laundering measures, allowing Mexican cartels to
launder millions of dollars worth of drug proceeds. Wells Fargo (WFC,
Fortune 500)
bought Wachovia in 2008.
HSBC
is also being investigated in connection with alleged manipulation of the London Interbank
Offered Rate, or Libor.
Last
month, British bank Barclays (BCS)
reached a $453 million
settlement on the issue with U.S. and U.K. regulators, and firms
including Deutsche Bank (DB),
Credit Suisse (CS),
Citigroup (C,
Fortune 500)
and JPMorgan (JPM,
Fortune 500)
are also being investigated.
First Published: July
16, 2012: 6:05 PM ET
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE LOOT FROM CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA! WHILE HIS DOJ IS OUT HARASSING LEGALS ON BEHALF OF
OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS, THE BANKSTER GO UNPUNISHED!
DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS SOARED GREATER THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS AND CRIMES ARE SOARING… so are
foreclosures!
OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE
LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!
Records
show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Consider the Obama
administration's choices for the four most important positions in financial
sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric Holder) and the head of the
Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington &
Burling, a law firm that
represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their industry
associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal defense
practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case. Mary
Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of FINRA, the
investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave her a $9 million severance for a job well done. And her head of
enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel for Deutsche Bank's North American business
during the entire bubble. So zero prosecutions isn't much of a surprise,
really.
Banking Is a Criminal Industry Because Its Crimes Go
Unpunished
Posted: 07/16/2012 8:23 am
Consider just this
month's news in financial services.
First, Barclay's has
been manipulating the Libor, the main interest rate upon which most other
interest rates and financial transactions are based, since 2005. Moreover,
Barclay's traders were colluding with traders in many other banks to assist
them in manipulating the Libor too, so that they could all profit from their
bets on it.
Second, JP Morgan
Chase is having a really great month. Recent reports describe how it is resisting Federal subpoenas related to
price-fixing in U.S. electricity markets. It is also accused (by former
employees among others) of deliberately inflating the performance of its
investment funds to obtain business. And finally, JP Morgan's failed "London whale" trade, which has now cost over
$5 billion, is being investigated to determine whether the loss was initially
concealed from regulators and the public.
Third, HSBC is paying a fine because it allowed hundreds of
millions, perhaps billions, of dollars of money laundering by rogue states and
sanctioned firms, including some related to terrorist activities and Iran's
nuclear efforts. But HSBC is only one of at least 12 banks now known to have
tolerated, and in some cases aggressively courted, money laundering by rogue
states, terrorist organizations, corrupt dictators, and major drug cartels over
the last decade. Others include Barclay's, Lloyds, Credit Suisse, and Wachovia
(now part of Wells Fargo). Several of the banks created special handbooks on
how to evade surveillance, created special business units to handle money
laundering, and actively suppressed whistleblowers who warned of drug cartel
activities.
Fourth, a new private
lawsuit cites documents indicating that Morgan Stanley
successfully pressured rating agencies into inflating the ratings of
mortgage-backed securities it issued during the housing bubble.
Fifth, Visa and
Mastercard have just agreed to pay $7 billion to settle a private
antitrust case filed by thousands of merchants, who alleged that Visa and
Mastercard colluded to fix fees and terms of service.
Just another month in
financial services. Is it unusual? No, it's not. If we go back just a little
further, we have UBS, HSBC, Julius Baer, and other banks actively marketing tax
evasion services to wealthy U.S. and European citizens. We have senior
executives of several banks (including JP Morgan Chase and UBS) strongly
suspecting that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, but deciding to make
money from him rather than turn him in. And then, of course, we have the
financial crisis and everything that led to it. As I show in great detail in my
book Predator Nation, we now possess overwhelming evidence
of massive securities fraud, accounting fraud, perjury, and criminal
Sarbanes-Oxley violations by mortgage lenders, investment banks, and credit
insurers (including senior executives of Countrywide, Citigroup, Morgan
Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, AIG, and Lehman Brothers) during the
housing bubble that caused the financial crisis. If we go back to the late
1990s, we have the massively fraudulent hyping of Internet stocks, and several
banks (including Merrill Lynch and Citigroup) actively aiding Enron in
committing its frauds.
So, July 2012 really
isn't abnormal at all. The reason for this is very simple. Over the past two
decades, the financial services industry has become a pervasively unethical and
highly criminal industry, with massive fraud tolerated or even encouraged by
senior management. But how did that happen?
Well, deregulation
helped, of course. But something else was far more important. It is the one
critical factor that unites all of the episodes cited above, including those of
this month. This critical unifying factor is the total number of criminal
prosecutions of major firms and senior executives as a result of all of these
crimes combined.
And what is that
number?
Zero.
Literally zero. A
number that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney shows the slightest
interest in changing.
Consider the Obama administration's
choices for the four most important positions in financial sector law enforcement.
The attorney general (Eric Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's
criminal division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington & Burling, a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the
major banks and their industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its
white collar criminal defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating
agency in the Enron case. Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing
bubble in charge of FINRA, the investment banking industry's
"self-regulator," which gave her a $9 million severance for a job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps
most stunningly of all, is Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel
for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero
prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
In contrast, what do
you think would happen to you if, as a lone individual, you were caught
supporting Iran's nuclear program? Do you think that you would get off with a
"deferred prosecution agreement" and a fine equal to a few percent of
your annual salary? No?
But that's because
you don't live right. You probably haven't been to the White House a dozen
times since President Obama took office, or attended White House state dinners,
like Lloyd Blankfein has. Nor have you probably overseen millions of dollars in
lobbying and campaign donations, or hired senior administration officials, or
sent your executives into the government in senior regulatory positions, or
paid $135,000 for a speech by someone who later became chairman of the National
Economic Council. And, well, you get the law enforcement that you pay for.
Charles Ferguson is
the author of Predator Nation:
Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
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