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HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

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Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#91

Post by LouisSayers »

I'm currently reading about money laundering facilitated by Australian banks in the book "The Lucky Laundry" by Nathan Lynch.

Here are some recent anti-money laundering law breaches:

* French bank BNP Paribas - fined almost $9 Billion in 2014 [1]

* Commonwealth Bank - fined $700 Million in 2018. [2]

* Westpac fined $1.3 Billion fine in 2020. [3]

It's pretty bad, here are just a couple of examples of the types of things going on.

In the case of Commonwealth Bank they knew people would literally sit outside ATMs stuffing money into machines until they were full, and they didn't do anything about it.

In the case of Westpac, due to their lack of monitoring, essentially helped facilitate child abuse transactions [4].

The banks have also gone out of their way to avoid providing required SWIFT information by routing money around it (counteracting laws put in place to avoid for example transferring money to terrorist orgs).

It doesn't sound like anyone from the banking industry got arrested (surprise surprise).

In the book he also talks about how the Australian Real Estate industry is filled with laundered money and how it is helping to prop up the price of housing in Australia. I'm only halfway through so assume there might be more details on this in the second half of the book.

1) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bnp-paribas-settlement-id...

2) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-04/commonwealth-bank-pay...

3) https://www.bellgully.com/insights/westpac-agrees-to-au-1-3-...

4) https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/21/legal...

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#92

Post by [deleted] »

metadat wrote: post #2

> In this case, HSBC provided money-laundering services of more than $881 million to various drug cartels including Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel. This included bulk movements of cash from the bank's Mexican unit to the U.S., with little or no oversight of the transactions. It also conducted transactions with Iran, removing references to the country in an effort to conceal them. Only $…

[deleted]

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#93

Post by olalonde »

vishnugupta wrote: post #67
bastawhiz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you answered the question. If I facilitate a drug cartel moving kilograms of cocaine, I'll be in jail until I'm very old. If a bank knowingly facilitates the same outcome through different means, why doesn't anyone at the bank face the same charges? What you're saying is that even though money laundering is necessary for drug cartel operations, it shouldn't be a crime (or should be a much lesser crime).…

You bring up a fascinating aspect of money which I like to contemplate about often. Money is the pure abstraction in the sense that it hides just about everything that brought it into existence. If I look at two $100 bills they are exactly the same; theoretically and practically. And yet they couldn't possibly be similar, they could have originated in crimes, be parts of legitimate businesses, so on and so forth. But…

You didn't mention it explicitly so just in case you didn't know, what you are describing is called fungibility[0] and is indeed an important property of money.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#94

Post by snozolli »

olalonde wrote: post #86
snozolli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you make the CEO responsible even though she probably had no idea that this was going on? You send the CEO to prison because they're responsible for what happens under them. CEOs always say they get paid so much because they're the ones bearing ultimate responsibility, so off to jail you go.

That's completely unreasonable. The probability of any Fortune 500 CEO going to prison would basically be 100%. Should the US president go to prison whenever a government employee commits a crime as well?

The President isn't the CEO of America, Inc., and American government isn't a monolithic organization.

However, yes, if sufficiently illegal activities were going on within the President's cabinet, then yes, send the President to prison.

As for any Fortune 500 CEO going to prison, well, that risk would certainly incentivize the pursuit of good behavior from the top down, wouldn't it?

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#95

Post by Marsymars »

rationalist wrote: post #90
Marsymars wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an increasingly major process to open one No disagreements with your post otherwise, but I haven’t found this to be the case personally. I’ve opened two bank accounts in the past year without much hassle - one a joint account at a big bank with my partner that we were able to do fairly painlessly from our house. (Opening account in her name was online, but then we had to call in for someone to manually add me…

Which credit union? All the ones I've encountered incorrectly state that they require Social Security Numbers by law. The law only requires that they have a numerical identifier, so a state ID/license should work as it apparently did in your case. Edit: I guess the downvotes are for assuming everyone's in the U.S., sorry!

Servus, it’s a credit union in Alberta/Canada.

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#96

Post by TacticalCoder »

Official CIA factbook numbers: 3% to 5% of the world's entire fucking GDP is due to criminal activities [1].

Of course this money mostly all ends up in the real economy.

[1] Numbers which do not account for what should be accounted as criminal activities but aren't because they're endorsed by the state.

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#97

Post by edgyquant »

jalapenos wrote: post #6

The unfortunate outcomes of these events is that, like a ratchet, it just gets harder and harder for ordinary citizens to go about their lives. It used to be that you could just walk into a bank and open an account on the spot. And it's still like that in many developing countries. It's now at the point that just having a bank account is becoming an asset in itself. It's an increasingly major process to open one, and…

My girlfriend and I opened a shared bank account in December. It was five minutes in the capital one app and we had a debit card less than a week later. I’ve personally opened 4 bank accounts (including that one) through 3 different banks over the last two years and each time was a similar process.

What world do you live in where opening a bank account is somehow getting more difficult instead of extremely less?

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#98

Post by donavanm »

LouisSayers wrote: post #91

I'm currently reading about money laundering facilitated by Australian banks in the book "The Lucky Laundry" by Nathan Lynch. Here are some recent anti-money laundering law breaches: * French bank BNP Paribas - fined almost $9 Billion in 2014 [1] * Commonwealth Bank - fined $700 Million in 2018. [2] * Westpac fined $1.3 Billion fine in 2020. [3] It's pretty bad, here are just a couple of examples of the types of thin…

Some “fun” reading from austrac and friends https://www.austrac.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-07/sa-br...

“Shockingly” real estate agents and solicitors arent covered by AML/KYC here. I believe the same problems with opaque beneficial ownership extends to trusts as well. Other countries have similar challenges, but at least theres some duty to report etc.

  Criminals may be drawn to real estate as a channel to launder illicit funds due to the:
  » ability to buy real estate using cash
  » ability to disguise the ultimate beneficial ownership of real estate
  » relative stability and reliability of real estate investment
  » ability to renovate and improve real estate, thereby increasing the value. Criminals are also motivated to buy property for further profit or lifestyle reasons.
  Compared to other methods, money laundering through real estate – both residential and commercial – can be relatively uncomplicated, requiring little planning or expertise. Large sums of illicit funds can be concealed and integrated into the legitimate economy through real estate.

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#99

Post by abduhl »

justinclift wrote: post #80
abduhl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn’t what I said. I said that the person who commits the crime should be the first one to go to jail. That implies others should follow.

Often times, the crime that's committed is because the boss told them to do it, then threatened the engineer when they initially said No.

Yes well that’s how a lot of crime happens. We don’t avoid prosecuting a triggerman, carjacker, or bank robber just because they got the order and were threatened for not complying. Even the Eichmanns that were just following orders went to Nuremberg.

Re: HSBC's Money Laundering Scandal (2022)

#100

Post by jamhan »

donavanm wrote: post #98
LouisSayers wrote: post #91

I'm currently reading about money laundering facilitated by Australian banks in the book "The Lucky Laundry" by Nathan Lynch. Here are some recent anti-money laundering law breaches: * French bank BNP Paribas - fined almost $9 Billion in 2014 [1] * Commonwealth Bank - fined $700 Million in 2018. [2] * Westpac fined $1.3 Billion fine in 2020. [3] It's pretty bad, here are just a couple of examples of the types of thin…

Some “fun” reading from austrac and friends https://www.austrac.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-07/sa-br... “Shockingly” real estate agents and solicitors arent covered by AML/KYC here. I believe the same problems with opaque beneficial ownership extends to trusts as well. Other countries have similar challenges, but at least theres some duty to report etc. Criminals may be drawn to real estate as a channel to launde…

The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (AML/CTF Act) covers AML in Australia. Tranche (Part) 1 was implemented immediately. Tranche 2, covering real estate agents (among others) was supposed to follow reasonably soon after. It's now been ~17 years and it's still not implemented. [1]

In those years, the Australian property market boomed and states like New South Wales with its Stamp Duty tax generated billions ($9.379 billion for the 2020-21 financial year) in revenue [2]

Last week's arrests [3] are a drop in the bucket.

[1] https://insight.thomsonreuters.com.au/business/posts/tranche...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-20/stamp-duty-adds-9-379...

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-03/afp-money-laundering-...

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