“ But some
bankers claimed it was legal. One said it was because Mexican landscapers were
working in the United States and then routing money back home to their
families.” HeHeHeHe…. Jokes on the stupid gringos
again!
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 thismonth'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 counselfor 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.
*
U.S.
Senate panel accuses HSBC in money-laundering report
6:23pm EDT
By Carrick Mollenkamp
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - A "pervasively polluted" culture at HSBC Holdings Plc
allowed the bank to act as financier to clients seeking to route shadowy funds
from the world's most dangerous and secretive corners, including Mexico, Iran,
the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia and Syria, according to a scathing U.S. Senate
report issued on Monday.
While
the big British bank's problems have been known for nearly a decade, the Senate
probe detailed just how sweeping the problems have been, both at the bank and
at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a top U.S. bank regulator
which the report said failed to properly monitor HSBC.
"The
culture at HSBC was pervasively polluted for a long time," said Senator
Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, a Congressional watchdog panel.
The report comes at a troubling time for a banking
industry reeling from a multi-country probe into the manipulation of global
benchmark rates. Last month, rival British bank Barclays Plc agreed to pay a
$453 million fine to settle a U.S.-U.K. probe into the rigging of the benchmark
interest rate known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.
The report caps a year-long inquiry that included a
review of 1.4 million documents and interviews with 75 HSBC officials and bank
regulators. It will be the focus of a hearing on Tuesday at which HSBC and OCC
officials are scheduled to testify.
The report described an HSBC compliance division
simply unable to battle the suspect money. High turnover of top compliance
officials made it difficult for any reform to take hold, the Senate report
said. Employees were "overwhelmed," swamped by mounting suspect
transactions that needed review.
"We're strapped and getting behind in investigations,"
one bank official wrote in June 2008. By that time, HSBC was cutting costs to
offset losses tied to subprime home loans and the brewing financial crisis. In
2010, one disgusted top compliance official threw up his hands and quit after
less than a year on the job, according to the report.
Typical of the problems inside the bank were
transactions tied to Mexico, a country the report said is "under siege
from drug crime, violence and money laundering." HSBC, according to the
report, helped move money for a foreign-exchange dealer called Casa de Cambio
Puebla that U.S. authorities have connected to illegal narcotic funds.
Between 2005 and 2007, there was a "growing
flood" of U.S. dollars moving between the exchange house and HSBC, setting
off red flags. But some bankers claimed
it was legal. One said it was because Mexican landscapers were working in the
United States and then routing money back home to their families.
(Reporting by Carrick Mollenkamp; Editing by Alwyn
Scott and Tim
Dobbyn)