"Given that over 35,000 people were brutally slain in Mexico at the hands of drug traffickers while HSBC laundered at least $880m of their money, it's shocking that the current system of sanctions does not include senior executives being held personally responsible for the actions of their institutions.
Noting that HSBC was laundering funds to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, Everett notified the FBI and CIA, launching a massive investigation that resulted in HSBC being fined $1.9 billion.
Recent scandals — JPMorgan's $6 billion London trading loss, an HSBC money laundering scandal that resulted in a $1.9 billion settlement, and inappropriate sales of credit-card protection insurance that resulted, on Thursday, in a $2 billion settlement by British banks — suggest that the largest banks are also too big to manage, control and regulate.
Perhaps there is no better example of these extremes than the empty and meaningless criminal charges against HSBC for laundering massive amounts of drug money, even as the war on drugs has so utterly devastated the black community.
She became the chief attorney for an ongoing probe into HSBC's money laundering crimes in 2010, during her assignment as the US attorney for the eastern district of New York.
After a long summer of high-profile scandals — JPMorgan Chase trading, Barclays rate-fixing, HSBC money laundering and more — the debate about the financial sector is becoming livelier.
Rather than undermine the policing of global banks, Mr. Lawsky's actions strengthen regulation, said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who held hearings last month exposing HSBC money laundering violations with Iran, Mexico and others.
Last year, the US authorities imposed a $1.9bn fine on HSBC for poor money laundering controls, prompting that bank to run down its activities in the money-service sector.
"The monitor also identifies areas where new compliance policies have not yet been implemented, including areas where the lack of due diligence currently exposes HSBC to serious money laundering and sanctions risks".
I point out to him that Stephen Green Revv'd Stephen Green, now Lord Green, trade minister and author of Good Value, a book about ethics and finance) ran HSBC when it was laundering Mexican drug money, and Roman Catholic John Varley was CEO of Barclays.
