Senate accuses HSBC of "Money Laundering, Drug Trafficking And Terrorist Financing"

When the tide goes out we can see the garbage strewn on the beach. And if these accusations are to be believed, at least one mega-bank has been a busy little garbage producer indeed.

Just because there is already an overflow of confidence in the financial system, here comes the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations with a 340 page report detailing how HSBC "exposed the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money laundering (AML) controls." Of course, since HSBC is one of the world's largest banks, what it did was not in any way unique, and it is quite fair to say that every other bank has the same loose anti-money "laundering" provisions.

More at Zero Hedge

Those with a Wall Street Journal subscription can also catch the story there:

"...The report said that HSBC did little to clean up operations that should have raised concerns, including its Mexico bank. That bank had a branch in the Cayman Islands with no offices or staff but held 50,000 client accounts and $2.1 billion in 2008, the report said.

The Mexico operation, Senate investigators allege in the report, should have been the global bank's most worrisome because it continued doing business with money-changing businesses known as "casas de cambio." These businesses were cited by U.S. authorities to be fronts for drug-cartel money laundering, and HSBC conducted business with them years after other big banks cut them off.

HSBC Mexico's top anti-money laundering official, as he prepared to leave the bank, told an official from HSBC's London compliance office in 2008 that he believed there was "a culture [of] pursuing profits and targets at all costs" and that it "was only a matter of time before the bank faced criminal sanctions," Senate investigators found.

And you can bet HSBC is not the only big finance name with its fingers in these rancid pies...

reply to post by silent thunder


Nope. They ain't the only one.

The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years

www.bloomberg.com...

reply to post by jam321


Here's another example separate from the one above where Bank of America laundered money for Los Zetas Drug Cartel;

July 9 (Bloomberg) -- The brother of the alleged leader of a Mexican coc aine-trafficking cartel used Bank of America Corp. accounts to invest the organization’s drug proceeds in U.S. racehorses, a FBI agent said.

www.sfgate.com...

reply to post by silent thunder


Would go along with the report on western banking involvement in the Colombian narcotics trade, www.abovetopsecret.com...

funny thing
British bank is accountable to the Senate foreign country and the U.S. bank will be accountable the House of Lords in England?
Or is it one country-United States of America & Britain, with its capital in Washington?