Money Laundering Scandals Bring Court Charges and Record Job Cuts to Euro Banks

Lubomir Tassev
Activist Post
 
The international financial establishment is known to express concern about the risks of money laundering when the crypto space is mentioned. A string of scandals indicates, however, that traditional banks are not only susceptible to the phenomenon but sometimes complicit, whether knowingly or inadvertently. New chapters have been added to the saga over the last few months that are hurting banks, bankers and their clients.

Deutsche Bank Prepares to Lay Off 20,000 Employees

 

Deutsche Bank, one of the biggest names associated with money laundering accusations, has been dogged by many problems during the past year. The leading German financial institution is now preparing for a major reorganization that may include the sacking of up to 20,000 employees, if the plan is approved at the end of this week.

The changes come after a failed merger with Germany’s Commerzbank a couple of months ago, which was eventually deemed too risky by the teams of both banks. It did not materialize, despite the support of the federal government in Berlin.

Many of the layoffs are expected to affect Deutsche Bank’s investment banking offices in London and New York. According to a BBC report, the German bank has 8,000 employees in the British capital. And the 20,000 jobs that are likely to be cut represent a fifth of the institution’s global staff.

Besides persistent problems with its investment business and unsatisfactory financial results, the banking giant has been suffering from its involvement in money laundering scandals. In November, 2018 its headquarters and other offices in Frankfurt were raided by law enforcement officers and representatives of the German tax authority.

During the operation, government agents, including prosecutors, were trying to establish whether Deutsche Bank employees assisted clients in setting up offshore accounts used to transfer illicit funds. The bank was connected to the big money laundering scandal at Danske Bank last year, which revealed that around €200 billion (around $230 billion) has flowed through its Estonian branch from suspicious accounts from the former Soviet space. 

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Money laundering - Why the UK does not prosecute it

"Despite the UK’s rhetoric about wanting a “world-leading reputation for integrity” as a financial centre, it has never prosecuted a single company or bank for money laundering."

True Publica

A study by the CCP Research Foundation – which analyses banks’ so-called ‘conduct costs’ – revealed that the biggest 20 banks worldwide, including the biggest four in Britain, had paid or set aside £264 billion for fines in the five years to 2017. Britain’s biggest banks have paid out £71 billion for misconduct in the decade since the financial crisis. Much of these fines have related to money laundering but they were not prosecuted in the UK.

Lloyds is the bank that has suffered the heaviest penalties with at least £23.4 billion in conduct-related costs and write-offs since 2008.  RBS is second on the list. Its conduct and litigation costs since 2008, including amounts it has earmarked but not yet used, add up to £20.6 billion. The bailed-out bank also agreed to pay £3.6 billion to settle an investigation by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) for misselling mortgage-backed securities – the bonds at the heart of the 2008 crisis in America.

RBS and Lloyds were bailed out when the financial crisis broke out to the tune of £45.5 billion and £20.3 billion respectively.

Barclays avoided a UK state bailout – but only by taking £12 billion what looks like illegal emergency funding from the state of Qatar. The Serious Fraud Office is involved.

HSBC has forked out nearly £10 billion in fines and other costs for its conduct since 2008.
In the last few weeks – Standard Chartered, the British bank has been ordered to pay $1.1bn (£842m) by US and UK authorities to settle allegations for breaching sanctions against countries including Iran.

But it doesn’t end there does it – it just keeps on going.

In 2019 alone, leaving aside Standard Chartered, the Financial Conduct Authority has dished out fines to the financial services sector at the rate of more than one a month. In total, to the 9th April, they have fined the industry or people in it collectively to the tune of £272,487,887.

What is interesting here is the missing link. British banks are world leaders in shovelling trillions into tax havens, most of it to evade taxation but a very good chunk of it is pure money laundering. 

Tyrants, despots, mass murderers, terrorists, traffickers – they are just as good a customer as any as far as the banks are concerned. Here, the British government and its toothless Financial Conduct Authority fail in every sense of the word. Money laundering through British tax haven islands and crown dependencies is something the state approves of – hence the lack of fines or punishment dished out for it.

Donald Toon, director at the National Crime Agency, admitted that money laundering in the UK was “a very big problem” and estimated that the amount of money laundered here each year has now risen to a staggering £150 billion. I would think that is on the light side.

Susan Hawley is Policy Director of Corruption Watch. She worked for six years at the Corner House on corruption issues, having previously worked in the policy team at Christian Aid on ethics and corruption issues. Here is her take, (originally published a year ago), on money laundering by British banks.

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Former CIA Officer Exposes Clinton Charity Fraud As Biggest Scandal In US History

Greg Hunter's USA Watchdog

Former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp says the reason for all the crime and treason at the FBI and DOJ all boils down to one thing – the Clinton's so-called “charity.”

Shipp explains, “Hillary Clinton was running and is running a global financial criminal syndicate.  She was using these secret servers to conduct Clinton financial money laundering business."

"The shocking thing about that is all the former directors of the CIA that have come out to support her, from Clapper to Brennan to Morell to Robert Gates supporting her being elected, knew about this criminal syndicate.  Comey was protecting it.  Lynch was protecting it.  Weissmann was protecting it.  And that is the big why.  What’s she got on these people?  Are they financial ties?  They had to be aware of this, especially the counter-intelligence units.  We know it was hacked into by foreign intelligence services because it was just hanging out there.  Hillary Clinton was running a secret server outside the Department of State for the purposes of laundering money through the criminal Clinton Foundation.”

Are the crimes and treason of the Clinton Foundation the anvil that is about to drop? Shipp says,

“It’s not just an anvil, I think it is a mountain and the nexus of everything.  This “Clinton Global Initiative” (CGI) is worldwide, and it’s been out there for a couple of decades.  It has now intertwined former Directors of the CIA and FBI.   George Soros is a part of it.  It’s connected to all kinds of global financial institutions...
It is at least a $100 billion...

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Lawsuit Claims Money Laundering In Hillary Victory Fund, Stars Implicated

NWO Report 

Big name stars who wrote big dollar checks are lawyering up. Steven Spielberg, Calvin Klein, even the CEO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg were caught in the net. All could soon be facing charges of making contributions in excess of the Federal Election Commission limits.

“After months of review, the FEC has refused to address the Clintons’ $84 million money laundering scheme that violated several campaign finance laws,” Ted Harvey announced. He is chairman of the watchdog group filing the lawsuit on Monday that formally turns up conservative heat under the FEC.

“The Clinton machine has escaped accountability for its illegal practices for far too long.” Four months ago, attorney Dan Backer notified election officials of an “unprecedented scheme to circumvent federal campaign finance law” but those in charge of election security “failed to act.”

The Washington, D.C. watchdog group is accusing the FEC of intentionally dragging their feet. Limiting the amount of money that individuals, especially rich and powerful ones, can throw at a particular candidate is absolutely crucial to fighting corruption. Fair elections are impossible to maintain without such limits. 

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Jeb Bush Linked to Cartel Money Laundering While Serving CIA

Wayne Madsen
Black Listed News

While Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.

Jeb’s early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars. Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali narco-cartels and Nicaraguan contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia.

Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush.
In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank’s president.

He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA’s Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and various Thai generals.

In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses: Zapata Petroleum Corporation, Zapata Offshore Company, and Overbey Oil Development Corporation. The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Jeb Bush’s Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco’s Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.

Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand. It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.

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Citigroup Discloses Money-Laundering Subpoenas

New York Times

Citigroup and its Mexican subsidiary have received grand jury subpoenas from federal prosecutors over issues of compliance with anti-money-laundering and bank secrecy laws, the bank disclosed on Monday.

The disclosure in the bank’s annual securities filing comes after Citigroup said its Mexican unit Banamex had been defrauded of as much as $400 million.

The grand jury subpoenas were issued by the United States attorney’s office in Massachusetts.

Banamex USA also received a subpoena from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation related to the Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering program, Citigroup said.

The purported fraud stems from a $585 million accounts receivable program Banamex had offered to an oil supply company, Oceanografia, in Mexico. Invoices for work Oceanografia was supposed to have completed were falsified, according to Citigroup. A person briefed on the matter said it was suspected that a Banamex employee was involved in the fraud.

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Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail

Comment: The superb Matt Taibbi offers another slice of reality about the Banksters and this time he's focussed on HSBC. 

I'd been with this bank for years and years. I only recently moved to a building society which is by far the lesser of two evils as its run by members as a mutual trust effectively, so it doesn't have shareholders. (I suppose these are credit unions or savings and loans organisations in the states). 

Laziness and convenience had stopped me from making the move. But the hypocrisy finally got my goat and I switched accounts which was surprisingly easy thanks to relatively new method called, unsurprisingly: "SWITCH".  So, those of you who haven't don't have all your funds in one basket and spread them over a wide area - preferably Building Societies.  Another re-run of 2008 global financial crash is coming and it's likely to be a whole lot bigger.

Hopefully HSBC's demise and the current system of banking as we know it is not far off.

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 Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching­ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.

Daily Beast: HSBC Report Should Result in Prosecutions, Not Just Fines, Say Critics

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."

It was the dawn of a new era. In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. But now, when you're Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to make sure you won't lose your license. Some on the Hill put it to me this way: OK, fine, no jail time, but they can't even pull their charter? Are you kidding?

But the Justice Department wasn't finished handing out Christmas goodies. A little over a week later, Breuer was back in front of the press, giving a cushy deal to another huge international firm, the Swiss bank UBS, which had just admitted to a key role in perhaps the biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the so-called LIBOR scandal, a massive interest-rate­rigging conspiracy involving hundreds of trillions ("trillions," with a "t") of dollars in financial products. While two minor players did face charges, Breuer and the Justice Department worried aloud about global stability as they explained why no criminal charges were being filed against the parent company.

"Our goal here," Breuer said, "is not to destroy a major financial institution."

A reporter at the UBS presser pointed out to Breuer that UBS had already been busted in 2009 in a major tax-evasion case, and asked a sensible question. "This is a bank that has broken the law before," the reporter said. "So why not be tougher?"

"I don't know what tougher means," answered the assistant attorney general.

Also known as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC has always been associated with drugs. Founded in 1865, HSBC became the major commercial bank in colonial China after the conclusion of the Second Opium War. If you're rusty in your history of Britain's various wars of Imperial Rape, the Second Opium War was the one where Britain and other European powers basically slaughtered lots of Chinese people until they agreed to legalize the dope trade (much like they had done in the First Opium War, which ended in 1842).

A century and a half later, it appears not much has changed. With its strong on-the-ground presence in many of the various ex-colonial territories in Asia and Africa, and its rich history of cross-cultural moral flexibility, HSBC has a very different international footprint than other Too Big to Fail banks like Wells Fargo or Bank of America. While the American banking behemoths mainly gorged themselves on the toxic residential-mortgage trade that caused the 2008 financial bubble, HSBC took a slightly different path, turning itself into the destination bank for domestic and international scoundrels of every possible persuasion.

Three-time losers doing life in California prisons for street felonies might be surprised to learn that the no-jail settlement Lanny Breuer worked out for HSBC was already the bank's third strike. In fact, as a mortifying 334-page report issued by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last summer made plain, HSBC ignored a truly awesome quantity of official warnings.

In April 2003, with 9/11 still fresh in the minds of American regulators, the Federal Reserve sent HSBC's American subsidiary a cease-and-desist­ letter, ordering it to clean up its act and make a better effort to keep criminals and terrorists from opening accounts at its bank. One of the bank's bigger customers, for instance, was Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi bank, which had been linked by the CIA and other government agencies to terrorism. According to a document cited in a Senate report, one of the bank's founders, Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, was among 20 early financiers of Al Qaeda, a member of what Osama bin Laden himself apparently called the "Golden Chain." In 2003, the CIA wrote a confidential report about the bank, describing Al Rajhi as a "conduit for extremist finance." In the report, details of which leaked to the public by 2007, the agency noted that Sulaiman Al Rajhi consciously worked to help Islamic "charities" hide their true nature, ordering the bank's board to "explore financial instruments that would allow the bank's charitable contributions to avoid official Saudi scrutiny." (The bank has denied any role in financing extremists.)

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Spanish royalty in the dock: Princess Cristina fraud case opens

Comment: I dread to think what goes on with the British royalty and civil list ... If ever a stratum of folks lived in a different reality to most of us, its these people.  But they are all at it at one time or another. Money laundering and corruption is part and parcel of the socio-economic power structure they inhabit. So, I suspect there is a vendetta or some kind of example/warning being made perhaps. 

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The Independent

For more than six hours in Palma de Mallorca yesterday, Princess Cristina, daughter of King Juan Carlos and seventh in line to the throne, had the dubious honour of becoming the first direct member of the modern-day Spanish royal family to be questioned in court. 

Facing a summons over allegations of being complicit in her husband's alleged tax fraud and money laundering, the princess avoided a full 40-metre "perp walk" to the five-storey stone court house in central Palma in front of dozens of television crews. She and her husband refute all allegations and deny any wrongdoings.

For security reasons, she was driven to the court's back door then very briefly faced the cameras before entering, her black jacket and dark trousers as low-key as her arrival. Once inside, as she sat in a high-backed chair opposite investigating judge Jose Castro, remaining incommunicado was a less easy option. For weeks, Spain's media had speculated about every detail of the king's daughter's court appearance. In a display of the intensity of interest, one television company measured the distance between Cristina's chair and Judge Castro – 2m, 20cms.

In the closed hearing, Cristina was expected to explain how and why she and her husband Iñaki Urdangarin racked up considerable personal expenses on a company credit card. The company in question, Aizoon, may have acted as a "shell" for laundering around ¤6m (£5m) of public money, allegedly acquired by Mr Urdangarin and his former business partner, Diego Torres, through a non-for-profit institute, Noos, in a separate case where Urdangarin faces possible accusations of tax evasion, falsification of documents and embezzlement. Princess Cristina has been cleared in the "Noos case".

Co-owned by Cristina and her husband, Aizoon outlays allegedly ranged from renovation of the family home in Barcelona – seized by the courts after her husband failed to post a bond for ¤6m in the Noos case – to a cocktail party costing ¤4,591, salsa classes and Harry Potter books. "She is acting very calmly, she's well-prepared," one lawyer at the hearing was reported as saying. That she had to make her declaration below a portrait of her father King Juan Carlos – present in all Spanish courts – was a reminder of the effects of the case for Spain's monarchy.

Once Europe's most beloved royal family, a series of public relations blunders and the drip-feed of lurid headlines surrounding the Urdangarin case have damaged their popularity. In 1998, El País reported yesterday, 78 per cent of Spaniards were in favour of the monarchy and 11 per cent preferred a republic. By 2012, 53 per cent remained pro-royal, while the pro-republican vote had more than tripled – to 37 per cent.

Yesterday, a noisy anti-royal demonstration was kept well away from the court, behind barriers. The closest streets to the court were closed and some 200 police officers had been drafted in. Not everybody was complaining, though. Enterprising flat owners had rented balconies overlooking the court at up to ¤1,500 a day. "A case like this may not sink the monarchy, but it's damaged their prestige," said Patricia Felix Navarro, a teacher, before the hearing. "Cristina is just another citizen and if I pay my taxes and obey the law, then so should she and her husband."

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Spain's Princess Cristina Charged With Tax Fraud And Money-Laundering

Reuters

MADRID (Reuters) - A Spanish judge charged Princess Cristina - younger daughter of King Juan Carlos - with tax fraud and money laundering, possibly paving the way to an unprecedented trial of a member of the royal family, the Superior Justice Tribunal of the Balearic Islands said on Tuesday.

After a lengthy investigation, Palma de Mallorca Examining Magistrate Jose Castro said in a 200-page ruling there was evidence that Cristina, 48, had committed crimes and summoned her to appear in court on March 8.

The princess's husband, former Olympic handball player Inaki Urdangarin, has been charged with fraud, tax evasion, falsifying documents and embezzlement of 6 million euros ($8 million) in public funds through his charitable foundation which put on sports business conferences in Mallorca and elsewhere in Spain.

The princess and Urdangarin both deny wrongdoing.

The case is one of many high-level corruption scandals in Spain that have undermined Spanish faith in public institutions at a time of severe economic crisis marked by deep cuts in public spending.

Opinion of the royal family in particular has sunk to its lowest level ever. A Sigma Dos poll published on January 5 showed more than 83 percent of Spaniards think the royal family has mishandled the Urdangarin case and an unprecedented 62 percent want the once-popular King Juan Carlos to abdicate.

Judge Castro, who opened his investigation into the royal couple three years ago, has struggled to make charges stick against Princess Cristina.

In April last year he ruled there was evidence that she had aided and abetted Urdangarin. A higher court threw out those charges in May, saying the evidence was not sufficient, but gave Castro more time to investigate an accusation of tax fraud.

In bringing the new charges, Castro went against the recommendations of the anti-corruption prosecutor on the case who in December argued there was no evidence she committed crimes.

In Spain the prosecutor and the judge on a case carry out separate investigations and may disagree on proceedings. The princess is expected to appeal the charges and they could be thrown out again, or the judge may be given a period of several months to build his case ahead of trial.

While they have been under investigation, the princess and her husband have ceased to participate in public appearances. She and the couple's four children moved last year to Geneva where she works for a Spanish bank's charity. Urdangarin remains in Spain.

The case is centered on Urdangarin's non-profit Noos Foundation. He is accused of using his powerful connections to win public contracts to put on events in Mallorca and elsewhere in Spain. 

The judge has said there is evidence that the foundation overcharged for organizing conferences and then hid the proceeds abroad.

Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

Rolling Stone

If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

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