Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists

[muriel_volestrangler]

Source: Internat. Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world.

The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.
...
JPMorgan, the largest bank based in the United States, moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, the leaked documents reveal.
...
JPMorgan also processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade, the records show, for Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump. The bank shuttled at least $6.9 million in Manafort transactions in the 14 months after he resigned from the campaign amid a swirl of money laundering and corruption allegations spawning from his work with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

Read more: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-banks-defy-u-s-crackdowns-by-serving-oligarchs-criminals-and-terrorists/

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The BBC on the HSBC files: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54225572
and the UAE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-54176127
and Barclays laundering for a Putin associate: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54225577

Deutsche Bank tops the list in amount of dubious transactions: $1.3 trillion. Of course they're Trump's bankers.

[AllaN01Bear]

1. there was a call to shut the big banks down when the original panam papers were made public

time to do it again.

[ck4829]

2. "Defied", "undermined"... Meanwhile the Trump admin sanctions the International Criminal Court

[turbinetree]

3. Why do we the public have to keep paying for this shit.................

[roamer65]

4. They don't shut these banks down because they are also used as conduits for intelligence services.

Last edited Sun Sep 20, 2020, 03:14 PM - Edit history (2)

They funnel dirty money for the CIA, MI6, etc, etc.

Remember BCCI anyone?

[PSPS]

5. Plus they funnel huge "campaign contributions" to the Republicans/GOP

[roamer65]

7. ...from Russian mob sources definitely.

[BComplex]

9. True that. But it still falls to us, "we the people" playing a rigged game.

All "men" are not created equal. Women, either.

[icymist]

6. This story is really big:

Link to tweet

The #FinCENFiles reveal German banks are among those facilitating suspected money laundering across the world.

$1.3 trillion of suspicious money flowed through Deutsche Bank accounts, according to the leaked documents.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-financial-scandal-criminal-networks

A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.

And the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it.

Today, the FinCEN Files — thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents — offer an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes. BuzzFeed News has shared these reports with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries.

These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.

[LiberalLovinLug]

8. Give Elizabeth Warren the Treasury Secretary job

Of course I highly doubt that will happen. Democrats are leery about making enemies of these powerful financial institutions. And they donate a ton of campaign cash. But she and Bernie are right. They should be broken up into smaller, competing companies.

They'd be quaking in their Guccis if Warren was announced the new SoT. And I'd actually fear for her safety.

[Volaris]

10. We should strip them of their corporate charters, and kick them out of the country.

[bucolic_frolic]

11. Yeah but they're really good at reporting citizens with a side gig /nt

[GoneOffShore]

12. And the people who get caught? Accidental Americans and expats.

[paleotn]

13. The Germans...

have a whole lot of explaining to do.

[Yavin4]

14. A lot of this money finds its way into high priced real estate in various big cities around the

world. Think NYC, Miami, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Quebec, Paris, etc.

Governments get a ton of tax dollars off of the property taxes. So, everyone looks the other way.

[Warpy]

15. The Panama Papers exposed the shell game, the network of dummy corporations

and straw men used to move billions around. Cartel money was traced to US banks in the 00s. Both stories died a quick death, the crash of 2008 had the banks all crying poverty as they laundered money from every crook on the planet, taking their cut with every single transfer.

SARs have been their "get out of jail free" cards for far too long, regulators filling the paperwork and doing nothing else about it, no one wanting to derail the gravy train that ran so well on criminal enterprise.

The bBC seems to be taking this seriously, but they took the other stories equally seriously.

Eventually, the crooks will stop trusting each other implicitly and the whole rotten thing will fall. When it does, it will take everything with it, planet wide. It has gone too far, IMO, to be salvageable, any regulation likely to start the collapse.