Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddybobs | Hacker News Reader

"At their scale, that's a small fine. Barely 10% of annual net profit."

HSBC was the bank of money laundering of the mexican drug cartels. They also helped fund terrorist organisations like ISIS. They made it possible to at scale deal drugs in the US.

When they were caught doing this - they shrugged and said they'd try better. Then they got caught doing it again. And they said sorry.

Eventually the government was aiming to indict the bank. There would be criminal charges. People would go to jail.

It is a small fine compared with their conduct. They got 'let off' at the last minute arguably because of 'systemic risk'. Too big to fail. Again.

You can find all about it on Dirty Money on Netflix.

View on HN

> "At their scale, that's a small fine. Barely 10% of annual net profit."

That quote does not appear in the linked article. Where does it come from, and who is "their"?

Sorry - that was from a comment below, and wasn't really what I was responding to. 'Their' means HSBC.

Assuming the documentary is accurate - that HSBC was the go to bank for money laundering. That was a big part of their business. That they went out of their way to hide transactions from the government (like transactions to ISIS and cartels). When caught they repeatedly got away with a shrug. That 100k people have been murdered related to mexican cartels - and the claim is that mexican cartels couldn't have operated at that scale without HSBC.

I was responding to the comment below that seemed to be saying the fine was 'big enough'. Which the documentary didn't agree with. The people that brought the charges and investigated HSBC didn't think so. Neither did the journalists who were there when the government tried to pass off the deal as a big success. The management didn't lose jobs. The worst that happened to them was that part of their bonuses were kept back.

Oh and the government dropped all charges in 2017. That part of the deal was the charges remained - ie they did commit crime but suspended sentencing.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-usa/hsbc-draws-line-...

https://inhomelandsecurity.com/hsbc-cartel-money-laundering/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-s...

(edit: grammar/spelling fixes)

It's a misplaced comment, looks like it was meant to reply to another commenter below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16496055

> HSBC was the bank of money laundering of the mexican drug cartels.

HSBC was created in hong kong by the british to launder opium money after the Opium Wars.

""The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank" was founded by Scotsman Sir Thomas Sutherland in the then British colony of Hong Kong on 3 March 1865, and in Shanghai a month later, benefiting from the start of trading into China, including opium trading"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC

Old habits die hard.

> They also helped fund terrorist organisations like ISIS.

Do you have a link to this? All I can find on Google (apart from six members of staff being fired over a "mock beheading video") is a story about 13 HSBC customers who had links to ISIS.

"HSBC to pay $1.9 billion U.S. fine in money-laundering case"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-...

Google "hsbc money laundering scandal" for more info.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com