Third prominent banker found dead in six days

[RainDog]

60. From your link and the Rolling Stone article

HSBC Said to Plan Sale of Swiss Private Banking Assets in Geneva

HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Europe’s largest bank, is planning to sell parts of its Swiss private bank as some foreign lenders retreat amid a crackdown on bank secrecy and rising regulatory scrutiny, four people with knowledge of the situation said.

HSBC is selling a largely Geneva-based business with about $15 billion in assets under management, according to three of the people, who asked not to be identified because talks are private. Documents for the business, which includes wealthy clients in France, have been sent to potential buyers and it may be sold in parts, though no sale is guaranteed, they said.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-31/hsbc-said-to-plan-sale-of-swiss-private-banking-assets-in-geneva

The Treasury Department keeps a list compiled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, and American banks are not supposed to do business with anyone on the OFAC list. But the bank knowingly helped banned individuals elude the sanctions process. One such individual was the powerful Syrian businessman Rami Makhlouf, a close confidant of the Assad family. When Makhlouf appeared on the OFAC list in 2008, HSBC responded not by severing ties with him but by trying to figure out what to do about the accounts the Syrian power broker had in its Geneva and Cayman Islands branches. "We have determined that accounts held in the Caymans are not in the jurisdiction of, and are not housed on any systems in, the United States," wrote one compliance officer. "Therefore, we will not be reporting this match to OFAC."

Translation: We know the guy's on a terrorist list, but his accounts are in a place the Americans can't search, so screw them.

Remember, this was in 2008 – five years after HSBC had first been caught doing this sort of thing. And even four years after that, when being grilled by Michigan Sen. Carl Levin in July 2012, an HSBC executive refused to absolutely say that the bank would inform the government if Makhlouf or another OFAC-listed name popped up in its system – saying only that it would "do everything we can."

The Senate exchange highlighted an extremely frustrating dynamic government investigators have had to face with Too Big to Jail megabanks: The same thing that makes them so attractive to shady customers – their ability to instantaneously move money around the world to places like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland – makes it easy for them to play dumb with regulators by hiding behind secrecy laws.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214page=2#ixzz2sFYTaXFW