Western banks 'reaping billions from Colombian cocaine trade'

Western banks 'reaping billions from Colombian coc aine trade'

www.guardian.co.uk

With Britain having overtaken the US and Spain as the world's biggest consumer of coc aine per capita, the Wachovia investigation showed much of the drug money is also laundered through the City of London, where the principal Wachovia whistleblower, Martin Woods, was based in the bank's anti-laundering office. He was wrongfully dismissed after sounding the alarm.

Gaviria said: "We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realise things about certain people they think are moving money for the drug trade – but the DEA [US Drugs Enforcement A

(visit the link for the full news article)

Interesting study and implications.

I had heard about the Wachovia case of money laundering for the drug cartels previously. It is interesting how the City of London is being singled out for comment in this instance.

I wonder if the main culprits are the same banks that took the bailout money? i.e. Barclays, HSBC etc.

Thoughts?

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

If the Government wanted to win the war on drugs all they would have to do is create a man made pathogen that attacks and kills of the coca plant!

They dont want to win the war though to much money to be made!

Originally posted by RandalFlagg
If the Government wanted to win the war on drugs

What war on drugs???

Any street any town they are freely available. Like you said, too much money involved.

Of course they are making billions! How else would their goons, the CIA, fund
their black ops?

reply to post by VoidHawk


There's no war on drugs -
Just a war on their competitors.
Small busts keep the prison industrial complex growing.
The rest is just window-dressing.
This war, like every other is a racket.

reply to post by Asktheanimals


I know. Where my daughter lives we can see the dealers on the street. We watch them deal to school children still wearing their school uniform. We know an old guy in the street has phoned the cops dozens of times and nothing happens.

Personaly I believe if the individual wants to use the softer stuff thats upto them but when we see school children buying it, and we know its being reported, and we know nothings being done, then clearly there is no war.

Tell it to the Mexican and Colombian people that there is no "war on drugs", which they find themselves in the middle of.

Basically it is an extremely messy struggle over a commodity hungered for by people around the world and in particular those from the developed world. Central American & Southern American countries are literally heaving under the direct, structural and embodied violence of this war.

There is clear evidence that the CIA/FBI have been (basically embodiments of government level gangs) involved in drug trafficking in the US/Central & South America and in South East Asia. This has been exposed by the likes of Gary Webb and is basically common knowledge.

I have yet to see any evidence implicating British banks, security services although you suspect that there has been and continues to be examples of this.

Anyone have any info on the British connection as cited in this report?

Too many government officials, DEA agents and officials, CIA officials and agents as well as local law enforcement, judges, lawyers, private prison officials, parole officers, border patrolmen and legislators are making tons of cash under the table with the war on drugs.

[color=#FF0000]In order to stop the war on drugs, we need to declare a war on corruption and greed.

reply to post by VoidHawk


Most folks don't realize the reason Dricky Dick went away.
At least with his life. The Kennedy boys not so lucky.



CHAPTER NINE - THE FRENCH CONNECTION
www.edwardjayepstein.com/agency/chap9.htm - Similarto CHAPTER NINE - THE FRENCH CONNECTION

PART III: THE NIXON CRUSADES. THE FRENCH CONNECTION ... Thus Watson left for Paris,- taking along a copy of the book The French Connection. He

Not gonna happen, greed and corruption is embedded in our genes. Poverty only make greed and corruption stronger


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

From your article:

Then we realized that the real weak link was the couriers in the smuggling rings.

reply to post by longjohnbritches


If everybody with any clout in the US CIA wanted to end drug trafficking it could be done but someone in the CIA obviously has a veto vote. There is this argument that basically states that the drug trade is kind of a Darwinian ethnic cleansing program. If you are a weak willed crackhead you die or go to prison. Create a democracy made up of weak willed crackheads and you never get any drug enforcement laws passed.

ATS should have been the do all END all of drug traffic.
What a farce.
But your granny's crotch! It's fair game.

Feds: Crooked TSA Screeners Arrested in Drug Trafficking Scheme
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2876549/posts

Apr 25, 2012 ... Feds: Crooked TSA Screeners Arrested in Drug Trafficking Scheme ... are more people riding in the cart than there are pulling it, the cart stops ...

War on drugs, war on terror

yeah right!

its only a war to eliminate the competition.

"freedom and liberty" my (bleep, bleep, bleep)

of course the bankers rule the world and they have plenty of shell companies to hide the transactions aka money laundering. The same place the bribe money goes to so they can't trace any of it. And people wonder why politicians never accomplish anything meaningful.

state capitalism and bilderbergers go hand in hand. free trade(low tariffs) only benefits the multinational big wigs...those that have many shares in those companies.

Lets call it a "war on people" then, what with the huge amount of deaths, instability in Mexico and Colombia and the incarceration rate in the US and other countries for users.

Wells Fargo, who took money from TARP, purchased Wachovia, the bank implicated in money laundering for the Mexican & Colombian Cartelswww.bloomberg.com... is now heavily invested in the prison for profit industry in the United States,

As Wells Fargo has grown over the years, using its bailout funds to gobble up rival Wachovia and expand to the East Coast, so has the U.S. prison population. By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted.

Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full quarter of the world’s prisoners. These developments are not unrelated. A driving force behind the push for ever-tougher sentences is the for-profit prison industry, in which Wells Fargo is a major investor. Flush with billions in bailout money and an economic system designed to siphon wealth from the working class to the idle rich, Wells Fargo has been busy expanding its stake in the GEO Group, the second largest private jailer in America. At the end of 2011, Wells Fargo was the company’s second-largest investor, holding 4.3 million shares valued at more than $72 million. By March 2012, its stake had grown to more than 4.4 million shares worth $86.7 million.

www.dailykos.com...

Conflict of interests at all? Oh, of course that does not exist in the US corporate system.

reply to post by Peruvianmonk


From an article dated Dec/2009 -

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result

source: The Guardian

That is/was quite a bailout - I bet Mr. Antonio Maria Costa was not a popular man in the banking sector after that interview.

reply to post by UmbraSumus


Yes this was discussed at the time on the forum,

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I wonder if drug money (coupled with massive amounts of tax payers money) will help bail out banks again during this current and I suppose continuation of the 2007-09 crisis.

This was reported back in 2005 on the BBC,

Sir Callum said: "There is increasing evidence that organised criminal groups are placing their own people in financial services firms." "They can increase their knowledge of firms' systems and controls and thus learn how to circumvent them to commit their frauds."

news.bbc.co.uk...

Interesting, yet probably small fry in comparison to the large scale fraud and crime being perpetrated by the "legitimate" owners of the banks.

I found an interesting case on a bank laundering money, involved in the drugs trade etc. Bank of Credit&Commerce International (BCCI). Here are some excerpts from a journal article about the scandal that BCCI was involved in.

BCCI was established in 1972 with capital from the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, and the Bank of America

The bank was a mess, financially and lawfully from very early on.

Yet, the bank was insolvent from the 1970s and its top managers had been manipulating the accounts concealing losses, keeping deposits off the books, hiding illegal BCCI investments in United States financial institutions, and generating false profits. Loans to the Gulf Group of shipping companies,3 which were larger than BCCI's capital base, were not serviced causing unsustainable costs of over $1 billion in the 1980s. An additional $1 billion losses were incurred in BCCI's treasury department.

As the liquidators suggested that several billion dollars were unaccounted for and investigations into BCCI's practices intensified and multiplied, an unparalleled international scandal was fuelled by press reports about BCCI's banking services to money launderers, drug traffickers, arms dealers, coffee smugglers, tax evaders, political offenders, dictators, and intelligence agencies around the globe.4

However BCCI had influential customers and backers.

It provided banking services, held accounts for, or was publicly associated with, heads or former heads of governments (James Callaghan,7 Willy Brandt, Alan Garcia of Peru, Jimmy Carter, among many others), intelligence agencies and agents (for example, the CIA, Kamal Adham,8 Richard Helms, William Casey)9 international organizations (such as the United Nations) and public relations firms (Hill and Knowlton), ambassadors (for example, Andrew Young, Sergio da Costa of Brazil), highlevel politicians (for example, United States Senator Orrin Hatch, former Senator John Culver - five British Tories, including Sir Julian Ridsdale, were BCCI consultants),10 and influential business people and bankers (including Larry Romrell, Bob Magness - founder of TCI, the largest United States cable company - David Paul, Jackson Stephens, Alfred Hartmann, Yves Lamarche).

The lawyers and lobbyists that represented BCCI in the United States of America included former Federal Reserve officials, federal prosecutors, and former high-level military officers, senators or government officials, including Clark Clifford, the counsel to Democratic Presidents from Truman to Carter.

In reference to the Iran-Contra scandal, BCCI and Noriega were found to be in business together.

The Kerry investigation into the Noriega-BCCI relationship, did not proceed smoothly. M. Pillsbury, an aid to Republican Senator Hatch was advising BCCI on lobbying strategya nd on how to deal with Kerry.31A s irdicated by BCCI lawyers' notes, Kerry's interest was not in BCCI by itself:

[According to Pillsbury] Senator Kerry wants to be praised for what he has done on money laundering; especially by conservative Republicans. His only interest in BCCI is to get info re: Noriega and get credit for his work.

In the face of opposition from various parties including within Kerry's own Committee on Foreign Relations, the section on BCCI was left out of the final report with only a recommendation of further investigation

BCCI found itself vunerable as many of its shadier customers found themsels overthrown or out of favour.

The Iran-Contra transactions were over and so was the Iran-Iraq war (both sides were secretly, illegally, or against overt foreign policy assisted by the United States of America, partly through BCCI). In addition, clients of BCCI such as Noriega, Duvalier, Somosa, Saddam Hussein were now overthrown or demonized by the West and the United States in particular. Ironically, such clients, who would have provided clout and enhanced BCCI's power in the past because they were allies and friends of the United States, increasingly became sources of weakness and vulnerability.

It seems that BCCI was known for its corrupt practices for some time before anything was done.

Evidence available to the Bank of England and other regulatory agencies could have justified the closure of BCCI much earlier than they did. Yet, BCCI could not be attacked before the end of the Gulf War. By 1991, however, Iraq was defeated by an alliance that depended heavily on the Arab support. It would be unlikely for regulatory agencies to engage in actions that could jeopardiset he alliance by embarrassing or antagonizing the owners of BCCI, the authorities of Abu Dhabi.42 Action that risked damaging the relations with the ruling elites in Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia43 - wealthy and eager backers of anti-communist activities- would have been blocked by foreign policy makers during the Cold or the Gulf Wars. The Financial Times argued that earlier action against BCCI' would scarcely have pleased the Foreign Office

heinonline.org.../jlsocty23&div=10&g_sent=1&collection=journals

You may not be able to access the journal which is why I have block quoted.

Another way of money being laundered, pre-paid cards.

It is, however, perfectly legal to carry, say, $50,000 embedded in the magnetic stripes of so-called pre-paid stored-value cards. They look like a credit or debit card but are not linked to a bank account, can in many cases be loaded anonymously, are not “monetary instruments” under U.S. law, and were labelled “the ideal instrument for large-scale drug trafficking and money-laundering operations” in a 2006 analysis by the National Drug Intelligence Center. It predicted that drug traffickers, narco-terrorists and other criminals would increasingly rely on stored-value cards — “superior to established methods of money laundering” — because they could be used without fear of documentation, identification, law enforcement suspicion or seizure.

In other words, a shot in the arm of the global money laundering industry, an illicit enterprise that accounts for between 2 and 5 percent of the world’s GDP, according to an estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The Center’s dark warnings did little to curb the rapid growth of the stored-value card industry — more than $300 billion a year by some estimates.

Unsurprisingly these cards have yet to be regulated.

So if the cards are such a threat, why is there no regulation? It is a question two senators, Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, asked in a February 16 letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The two, respectively the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, last year authored an amendment to close the stored-value card loophole. The amendment became part of an act on credit card accountability and disclosure President Barack Obama signed into law on May 22 last year.

The amendment stipulated that the Treasury Department work out regulations on the sale, issuance, redemption and international transportation of stored value cards within 270 days. The deadline lapsed on February 16 and the letter asks for an explanation for the delay in issuing rules. So far, there has been no reply. It’s not clear whether the delay is due to bureaucratic inertia, overwork in a Treasury Department busy with a deep financial crisis, or, as money laundering expert Charles Intriago put it, “a manifestation of the unhealthy power of big money, financial institutions and their lobbyists.”

blogs.reuters.com...