by SANDIP DAS VERMA
Please watch the following video and read the US Senate hearing of Treasury Dept officers regarding HSBC Bank’s drug money laundering of $881 million. They paid a fine of $1.9 Billion but no one went to jail. This was a repeat crime admission by the bank. The HSBC was warned for similar types of offenses in 2003 and 2010.
During a Senate Banking Committee hearing on money laundering, ?Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat from Massachusetts) asked the treasury officers:
“How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?”
Then she questioned the unjust US system:
“If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re gonna go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life.” “But evidently if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your bed at night — every single individual associated with this. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”
The video is worth a watch and so is the Reuters article given below.
HSBC to pay $1.9 billion U.S. fine in money-laundering case
by ARUNA VISWANATHA and BRETT WOLF
(Reuters) – HSBC Holdings Plc agreed to pay a record $1.92 billion in fines to U.S. authorities for allowing itself to be used to launder a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico and other banking lapses.
Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel between them laundered $881 million through HSBC and a Mexican unit, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.
In a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, the bank acknowledged it failed to maintain an effective program against money laundering and failed to conduct basic due diligence on some of its account holders.
Under the agreement, which was reported by Reuters last week, the bank agreed to take steps to fix the problems, forfeit $1.256 billion, and retain a compliance monitor. The bank also agreed to pay $665 million in civil penalties to regulators including to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department.
“We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again. The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes,” HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said.
Reuters for more