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HSBC

HSBC Reputation "Crushed" by Mexican Money Laundering, CEO Says

HSBC Holdings Plc’s reputation was “crushed” after it agreed to pay $1.92 billion to settle U.S. probes of money laundering in places such as Mexico, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver said. “I’ve been in the firm 33 years and this gives me absolutely no pleasure whatsoever,” he told U.K. lawmakers in London today. “You shouldn’t be under any illusion as to how seriously we take this and how upsetting this whole thing has been. We’ve crushed our reputation with the Mexican events.” The settlement included a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. The U.K.’s Financial Services Authority said the London-based bank will have to employ an independent monitor to oversee compliance with anti- money laundering requirements. HSBC’s Mexican branches had become so well-known to drug traffickers as the place to launder proceeds from illicit sales that cartels began using special boxes to speed transactions, U.S. prosecutors have said.

Shamed HSBC takes $2 billion hit for US, UK scandals

Revelations of lax anti-money laundering controls at HSBC are "shameful and embarrassing" for Europe''s biggest bank, its boss said on Monday, and it may have to pay out well over $2 billion for the scandal and in compensation for UK mis-selling. HSBC set aside $700 million to cover fines and other costs after a US Senate report criticised it this month for letting clients shift funds from dangerous and secretive countries, notably Mexico.

Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver told reporters the ultimate cost could be "significantly higher". "What happened in Mexico and the US is shameful, it''s embarrassing, it''s very painful for all of us in the firm," he said on a conference call. "We need to execute on the compliance changes and then prove ourselves worthy and rebuild this over a number of years. There are no quick and easy fixes."

U.S. report says HSBC handled Iran, drug money

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.

Mexico fines HSBC for lax money-laundering controls

HSBC has been fined $27.5 million (17.76 million pounds) in Mexico for lax controls in its anti-money laundering systems, a week after being slammed for allowing clients to shift funds from dangerous and secretive countries in a scathing U.S. Senate report. The fine by Mexico's National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV) was due to "non-compliance with anti-money laundering systems and controls" and related to late reporting of 1,729 unusual transactions, failing to report 39 unusual transactions, and 21 administrative failures.

HSBC Faces $1 Billion 'Money Laundering' Fine:

Mexico Made 11 Laundering Accusations Involving HSBC

Trade minister Lord Green 'failed to halt flow of drugs cash' as HSBC boss

VIDEO: HSBC Money Laundering Probe Linked to MexicoMulti-Billion DollarDrug Cartel

Drug war ensnares big banks for letting Mexico cartels stash cash

Prosecutors in the US and Mexico have banks in their crosshairs for helping drug smugglers and money launderers transfer and hold their illegal earnings.
 

HSBC and other major banks have been accused of helping launder money for the narco criminals seen waging a brutal war in Mexico largely to win drug markets in the United States. HSBC officials say they are cooperating with investigators...

The accusations come as Mexican and US authorities have ramped up crackdowns on transnational crime rings’ vast earnings. Government prosecutors say they are chasing down drug profits and more aggressively targeting the financial institutions that let those profits amass in their vaults.

A US Senate investigation has accused HSBC of laundering $7 billion, transferring funds for Mexican clients through accounts in the Cayman Islands to accounts in the US.

 

Switzerland blocks millions in Uzbek money-laundering probe

Switzerland has blocked bank accounts containing several hundreds of millions of dollars in a money-laundering probe involving Uzbek nationals, the attorney general's office said Wednesday. "The attorney general has frozen several hundreds of millions of francs (dollars) in different Swiss bank accounts as part of this investigation," said Jeannette Balmer, a spokeswoman for the office known as the MPC. Individuals close to Uzbek President Islam Karimov are at the centre of the probe, Radio Television Suisse (RTS) reported.

JPMorgan faces money laundering probe: source

JPMorgan Chase & Co's compliance with U.S. anti-money laundering laws is being reviewed by a banking regulator, a source said, making the largest U.S. bank the latest target of a wide investigation of how banks prevent transactions involving drug money and sanctioned countries. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent branch within the Treasury Department, is examining JPMorgan's systems that are designed to monitor and filter such transactions, said the source, who is familiar with the situation...

The latest investigation comes in the midst of stepped-up efforts by regulators to crack down on money laundering, including transfers of drug money through bank networks and funds from countries facing international sanctions such as Iran.

Offshored Trillions: The Hidden Economy That's Robbing the World

The Tax Justice Network (TJN), a British-based policy institute, determined that $21 trillion to $32 trillion in private funds are currently socked away in tax havens. The biggest contributor is China, which has offshored at least $1.2 trillion. Russia, Korea, Brazil and Kuwait round out the top five. Although U.S. citizens are small-timers when it comes to offshoring, our banks play a big part in the movement of global wealth to tax havens. TJN statistics suggest that, of the top 10 banks for global offshoring, five -- Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan/Chase -- are based in the U.S.

British Bank in $340 Million Settlement for Laundering

Standard Chartered, the British bank, has agreed to pay New York’s top banking regulator $340 million to settle claims that it laundered hundreds of billions of dollars in tainted money for Iran and lied to regulators...

Mr. Lawsky based his case, in large part, on claims that the bank had violated state law by masking the identities of its Iranian clients, lying to regulators and thwarting American efforts to detect money laundering. Particularly difficult for the bank, people with knowledge of the settlement talks said, was a trove of e-mails and memos detailing an elaborate strategy devised by the bank’s executives. An e-mail from a lawyer to bank executives in 2001 said that payment instructions for Iranian clients “should not identify the client or the purpose of the payment,” according Mr. Lawsky’s order.

In Laundering Case, a Lax Banking Law Obscured Money Flow

The list of global banks that have been accused in recent years of laundering foreign transactions totaling billions of dollars has been growing — Credit Suisse, Lloyds, Barclays, ING, HSBC — and now Standard Chartered...

What the cases have in common is that the accused banks took advantage of a law that was not changed until 2008 and that allowed banks to disguise client identities and move their money offshore. The cases, including one filed this week by New York’s banking regulator against Standard Chartered, also cast a harsh light on just how much activity with Iran was permitted in the years leading up to 2008 and whether the practices had violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

Billions in Identity Theft-Related Tax Fraud Undetected by IRS

World's Elite Hide $21-32 Trillion From Tax Man in Offshore Accounts

Tax Justice NetworkTax Justice Network, The Price of Offshore Revisited:

At least $21 trillion of unreported private financial wealth was owned by wealthy individuals via tax havens at the end of 2010. This sum is equivalent to the size of the United States and Japanese economies combined.

There may be as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets held offshore by high net worth individuals, according to our report The Price of Offshore Revisited, which is thought to be the most detailed and rigorous study ever made of financial assets held in offshore financial centres and secrecy structures.

We consider these numbers to be conservative. This is only financial wealth and excludes a welter of real estate, yachts and other non--financial assets owned via offshore structures.

The research for the Tax Justice Network by former McKinsey & Co Chief Economist James Henry comes amid growing concerns about an enormous and growing gulf between rich and poor in countries around the globe. Accompanying this research is another study by TJN, entitled Inequality: You Don't Know the Half of It, which demonstrates that all studies of economic inequality to date have failed to account properly for this missing wealth. It concludes that inequality is far worse than we think.

£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite

Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, new research reveals. A far-reaching new study suggests a staggering $21tn in assets has been lost to global tax havens. If taxed, that could have been enough to put parts of Africa back on its feet – and even solve the euro crisis

Private banking's cosy world under siege

Cash-strapped countries are putting increasing pressure on private banks to help them claw back money from tax evaders...For years, governments turned a blind eye to their wealthiest citizens squirrelling away their riches in such tax havens. But since the global economic meltdown, cash-strapped governments are scrabbling around for revenue, and Switzerland has been one of the first places they have looked.

Coming To America (to launder his millions?)

Question: how did an African politician, on an official salary of roughly $6,000 a month, manage to acquire the lifestyle of a Hollywood billionaire, partying at the Playboy mansion, travelling in private jets, and living at a $30m Malibu mansion filled with impressionist artwork, and surrounded by its own private golf course?

Answer: simple. First, that politician was lucky enough to be Teodoro Nguema Obiang, heir apparent to the autocratic dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny country in West Africa which since discovering huge oil reserves in the mid 1990s has acquired the dubious distinction of having one of the world’s most spectacularly-corrupt governments.

Secondly, Obiang was able to find a pair of high-flying Beverly Hills lawyers who – in exchange for extravagant fees - were prepared to set up an opaque string of shell companies that allowed him to secretly control dozens of US bank accounts through which tens of millions of his ill-gotten dollars could be laundered.

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Mexican Drug Cartel Laundered Money Through Bank of America, FBI Alleges

An FBI afidavit says that the Mexican drug cartel has been reportedly funneling cash through a Texas-based racehorse business with BofA accounts. The U.S. government has described Los Zetas in the past as "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico." In the past, Mexican drug syndicates have allegedly used BofA accounts to buy planes to transport cocaine... Between 2004 and 2007, the bank was also the alleged destination for almost $10 million in illicit funds from an influential political family in Equatorial Guinea.

BofA has admitted such errors in the past. In 2006, officials acknowledged they'd failed to catch South American clients laundering $3 billion through one of its Manhattan branches...

...BofA hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing, and...is cooperating with the FBI investigation.

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Video 182 Lavado de Activos y financiación del terrorismo (INTRO) from www.auditool.org on Vimeo.

Chasing kleptocrats' loot: Narrowing the effectiveness gap (PDF, 34 pp.)

International measures to counter the laundering of looted wealth have not had a significant impact, despite their apparent strength. Evidence, including an original case study of Papua New Guinea, suggests that only a small fraction of funds derived from corruption are intercepted. This effectiveness gap is caused principally by the laxity of banks in controlling wire transfers and the willingness of corporate service providers to supply untraceable shell companies. Current policy evaluation fails because it equates inputs with effectiveness and does not include clear measurement of results. This can be remedied by testing the ease of making suspect transactions or forming shell companies, using either audit studies or field experiments. Two such studies of shell company formation show that rules mandating sensitivity to customer corruption risk are ineffective. Such studies are cheap, practical, and suitable for use by development agencies and their partners in developing countries.

We must clean up our act on money laundering

Convictions for money laundering is the measurement ultimately used by governments around the world to measure success. Yet with few exceptions, countries are failing. Sometimes the limiting factor is expertise. But too often shortcomings revolve around local corruption and a lack of political will. Just compare the amount of money laundered worldwide with the number of reported convictions (only a handful in any given year). It saddens me to say that for a money launderer to be caught and convicted, he or she is either very careless or very unlucky.

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