ANZ, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup face 'criminal cartel' charges
bbc.com
bbc.com
When HSBC laundered money for the Mexican Cartel [1], just had to pay a one time fine of $1.92B [2] and say "we're sorry".
Would be extremely surprised if the bank's legal teams let it get far into prosecution.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-s... [2] http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/10/news/companies/hsbc-money-la...
Matt Taibbi writes about this extensively in one of his books, I can't remember which, but the main points are included in this article for anyone interested.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/eric-holder-wall-...
It seems Australia (in particular) has had enough, and is starting to throw it into the public domain. Australia has a good reputation to follow through (see Catholic abuse commission)
The Australian public in particular has had a guts full of persistent high housing prices, aggressive foreign investment behaviour, and foreign hedge funds carving out Australian businesses.
Now they are singing a different tune. I'll be very interested in seeing what happens.
Some people say no one is interested in passing it because it might reduce flows of money necessary for sustaining the price of Australian real estate.
[1] https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/03/federal-government-...
yet here in the USA, thinking the same way would get you branded a facist..
It was a little bit more than that. They had a deferred prosecution agreement, and had an independent monitor in the company that reviewed all steps to improve their compliance processes and could have triggered the DPA if they didn't improve.
I was working at HSBC during this time, and no-one took for granted that they would get passed their "parole" period.
It's not my place to condemn nobody, but if you believe in fairness you have to realize that in a just society you either condemn white collars as anybody else, or condemn nobody. If the execs or anybody at HSBC was scared is of little to no value, when the decision of the justice system is unfair.
Which is what the article says straight in the subheading.
> If you're suspected of drug involvement, America takes your house; HSBC admits to laundering cartel billions, loses five weeks' income and execs have to partially defer bonuses
I don't think any of my colleagues at the time would have complained if the people responsible for the money laundering went to jail.
This time, I think there is a good chance someone in banking will go to jail. Why do you think the ACCC are going so hard on them?
Cartels are far from dedicated to just drugs. Anything illegal that means money is their turf: kidnapping, ransom, prostitution, human trafficking, and a long etc.
Let's be blunt: many people push drug legalization because they just want recreational drugs, not because they want to fight crime. If all drugs were legalized, the cartels would still launder money from other areas, and you can't legalize everything that makes them money.
At best, someone will resign.
More likely, the megacorps will be fined a token amount of money, and continue with business as usual.
Is there a country on this planet where the financial sector is not scandal-plagued? It is a serious question, with a cynic undertone, still, seriously: is there one? Can a "financial sector" work properly?
1) The banks face wide ranging, competent and impartial oversight and they know it. Unsure this exists but its theoretically possible.
2) The government is directly involved in bank activity so there is no one impartial to investigate scandal-worthy behavior.
3) The government and the banks are separate but bank oversight is negligible or ineffective. This causes scandal-worthy behavior to go unnoticed.
I suspect scandal free countries largely fall into category #2 and #3.
There is another option: a small bank that does not trade derivates and where people within know the customers not only by an excel sheet [1]. But then again this is impossible to scale. It's still nice to see.
[1] https://translate.google.at/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://...
Unless you don't count individual actions, this is probably nonexistent.
My hometown had a very small regional bank with roughly 3 branches total. One manager was caught skimming funds out of the vault. She was responsible for the closing amount at the end of the day, but she didn't know that there was another person who double checked behind her.
The other was someone who was skimming funds from deployed military and fixed-income retirees. I don't recall the exact process for deployed military, but it involved removing extra funds from their accounts when an auto-pay transaction (wireless bill, mortgage, etc.) hit. I don't know the details like if she somehow bumped the transaction amount or added a small transaction fee.
The fixed-income retirees was simple. When an elderly person came in to cash a check, she would palm a bill or two and short the customer.
Money is transferred reliably and quickly? Bank accounts are safe, and the insurance banks need to pay is and remains cheap? Salescritters never offer "high-interest low-risk" investments? Define your threshold.
There are a few tens of thousands of banks in Europe that haven't been in trouble with the law. By your condition, the number of banking scandals in my home country (Norway) is either zero or one since I was born, and that possibly law-breaking scandal involved nine or ten customers (they asked the regulator once and assumed that the answer applied to nine similar deals).
The world outside the Garden of Eden doesn't really get much better. The low cost of account insurance in most of the world tells a similar story: banking largely functions, even if not without warts and mishaps.
The UK happily lets in an estimated 90 billion a year of dirty money to be laundered in the City of London, and all we need do to stop it is enforce beneficial ownership registries.
The US holds non US transactions to a higher standard of proberity than onshore (foreign corrupt practises act)
I am still guided by two principles on this - that complete openness and transparency solves 80% of problems and rigorous competition solves the rest (my favourite phrase - a billionaire is an example of market failure)
Nonsense in more ways than one
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmfa...
This is the first sentence to mention money laundering "The Government responded robustly to the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury in March 2018. But despite the strong rhetoric, President Putin and his allies have been able to continue “business as usual” by hiding and laundering their corrupt assets in London."
Section 3 is called "Closing the Laundromat".
Writing this comment served to remind me that the publications from the UK Parliament are generally of very high quality (certainly anything I've ever read).
I'll take greedy financiers ripping off other greedy financiers over the vast surveillance industry that Silicon Valley is currently building out. But everyone on these boards is innocent of that, of course.
Slap on the wrist at worst i'd say.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/deutsche-banks-u-s-operations-d...
"..in summary: an opaque Chinese conglomerate says that it is the largest shareholder of Germany’s biggest bank, and has claimed a seat on the board. But the publicly available trail of information ends in Bermuda, obscuring a crucial link in its convoluted chain of ownership, and the parties involved seem reluctant to say anything about it."
No jail? You fail.