McConnell invites DOJ Pride to investigate HSBC's $billions Libor loans allegedly used by his sister Kristine Marcy and John Kerry to replace the recently-demolished Cabrini Green with SBA HUBZones (cf. Hawaii Obama) as logistic bases for Candyman killers (cf. Fast & Furious guns at crime scenes associated with Denver Dark Knight Rises and Connecticut school children massacre).
"Cabrini Green -- Electro for Obama"
.jpg)
Logo for Cabrini Green Gangster Disciples of HSBC’s Candyman (?).
“Senate gives HSBC an American nightmare … US Senate report exposes how the bank's US operation became an easy vehicle to launder money
“Why are you here in the US,” Senator Tom Coburn asked Irene Dorner, the head of HSBC’s North American operations, at a highly charged Senate hearing in Washington. “It’s a terrific place to do business,” she replied.
HSBC’s history in the US stretches back to the 1850s, but rarely can Britain’s biggest bank have endured a worse week in the home of capitalism. A blistering 335-page report from a leading Senate committee detailed how the bank’s failure to enforce anti-money laundering laws left America’s financial system exposed to Mexican drug cartels, a Saudi bank with ties to al-Qaeda and rogue nations such as Iran and Sudan. Carl Levin, the senator who led the year-long investigation culminating in the report, described some of its findings as “stunningly unacceptable.”
Ms Dorner told the senator that HSBC is in the US to help American companies do business in Asia, where the bank has historic ties. However, the report paints a picture in which its American operations were seen as the easiest vehicle around to launder money. Nowhere does this view appear to have been clearer than in Mexico, where HSBC expanded aggressively with the purchase in 2002 of Banco Internacional for $1.1bn.
HSBC knew from the start that the bank, Mexico’s fifth largest, had problems. David Bagley, who dramatically quit as head of global compliance during Tuesday’s Senate hearing, wrote to colleagues shortly after the purchase that anti-money laundering (AML) practices at the bank were “virtually non-existent”. Although the report found that HSBC had made efforts to improve compliance, they were not pursued vigorously enough and often required a shock to toughen enforcement. A major one arrived in 2007 when Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman and HSBC customer, was arrested for drug, firearms and money laundering charges. A raid on a house owned by Mr Gon, who protests his innocence, discovered more than $200m in cash.
Related Articles
Miliband: Lord Green must answer HSBC scandal questions
19 Jul 2012
HSBC scandal: Lord Green avoids questions
23 Jul 2012
HSBC scandal: Lord Green avoids questions
23 Jul 2012
Lord Green: 'Banking industry is not corrupt'
24 Jul 2012
HSBC boss quits over money laundering
18 Jul 2012
HSBC's Senate testimonies: in full
17 Jul 2012
Paul Thurston, who headed HSBC’s Mexican operation for a year and is now global head of retail banking, wrote an email to a colleague that “this is a very serious, and high profile, case which has potential reputational damage to the HSBC Group”. Mr Thurston, who made improvements to compliance during his stint in Mexico, told the hearing that Banco Internacional was a fast-growth bank with lax controls. The absence of controls allowed the bank to provide accounts in the Cayman Islands to Mexicans, 15pc of which HSBC had barely any information on.
And the report shows that the culture at HSBC was frequently to put profit ahead of compliance with AML rules that the US government had toughened in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and would do so again over the next decade.
A snapshot of the tension is provided by an email that John Root, then head of AML for HSBC in Latin America, wrote in July 2007 to Ramon Garcia, who headed compliance in Mexico. We “just can’t keep rubber-stamping unacceptable risks merely because someone on the business side writes a nice letter. It needs to take a firmer stand. It needs some cojones. We have seen this movie before, and it ends badly.”
It was not just in Mexico where the need to comply with America’s AML laws rubbed up against the pursuit of profit, according to the report. The US has had sanctions against Iran since the hostage crisis in 1979. Until HSBC pulled out of the country in 2007, the bank harboured ambitious expansion plans in the Middle Eastern country.
The report suggests a pattern of behaviour in which HSBC’s European operations put pressure on their US counterparts to duck various US requirements, including one that demanded that if a wire transfer had any links to Iran it was made clear on the paperwork. An outside audit found that, between 2001 and 2007, 25,000 transactions processed by HSBC that involved Iran skirted this requirement. HSBC’s pursuit in 2001 of business from Bank Belli, then Iran’s largest commercial bank, appeared to prove too much for one senior executive at the bank’s US division. “With the amount of smoke coming off this gun, remind me again why we should be supporting this business?”, Douglas Stolberg, head of commercial and institutional banking, wrote to a colleague.
The other consistent voice to emerge from the report is that of the bank’s beleaguered compliance department in the US. Carolyn Wind, who ran compliance in the US between 2001 and 2007, was dismissed for complaining about a lack of resources. Between 2006 and 2009, less than 200 of HSBC’s 16,500 staff in the US worked in compliance to monitor wire transfers that had soared to total $94.5 trillion in 2005.
In the autumn of 2009, as US scrutiny from US authorities was beginning to emerge, HSBC hired a former US Treasury official, Wyndham Clark, to help run its US compliance. Nine months into the job, he wrote that “with every passing day I become more concerned ... if that’s even possible.” Two months later he quit.
Although this week’s hearing is over, HSBC still faces a fine from the Department of Justice that could be up to $1bn [to be placed in the DoJ Pride Asset Forfeiture Fund and shared with corrupt law enforcement officers to fund ongoing Candyman murder for hire]. In January, HSBC hired as its chief lawyer Stuart Levey, a former Treasury official who had been in charge of enforcing anti-money laundering laws and pursuing violations of the financial sanctions the US has in place.
Levey told the committee that “being compliant and having the right controls in place is in our (HSBC’s) long-term financial interest.” The pressure on the British bank to prove that it means it has never been greater.”
“Alinsky then goes on to boast about his association with the Chicago Mob, including Al Capone and Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, who Alinsky says he called "The Professor.” Alinsky approached the criminals under the guise of doing student research. Nitti and the other mobsters not only accepted Alinsky but actually revealed everything about their operation to him. This included extortion and murder.
PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any compunction about consorting with -- if not actually assisting -- murderers?
ALINSKY: None at all, since there was nothing I could do to stop them from murdering, practically all of which was done inside the family. I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities, although I joined their social life of food, drink and women: Boy, I sure participated in that side of things -- it was heaven.
Now there’s a moral precept for you; when there are no men, be thou an observer who shares food, drink and women.
Alinsky continues:
And let me tell you something, I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the Mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.
So is revealed the real face of Community Organizing for you: the ethics of Al Capone.
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that the period when Alinsky was embedded with the Chicago Mob was right around the time that Prohibition was coming to an end. This was a time when organized crime needed to replace illegal booze as a profit center.
Where did the Mob look for a new business model? The unions.
If you want to see another reason that the past isn’t really the past, consider this: while Saul Alinsky was observing organized crime, the mob was taking over the modern labor movement, In fact, the SEIU--Obama’s shock troops and the allies of the Occupy movement--grew up in this same era. The tie between criminals and labor is made explicit in the interview.
Alinsky joivially tells a truly appalling story about befriending a criminal youth gang, where he went to a morgue, propped open the eyes of a slain gang member, took a photo and then presented it to the mother of the murdered young man and claimed the dead man had given the photo to Alinsky the week before. It’s a disgusting thing to do, yet Alinsky is clearly still proud of it, decades later. The Playboy interviewer points out the obvious and says the ploy was “cynical and manipulative.” Alinsky’s glee is unabated.
It was a simple example of good organizing. And what's wrong with it? Everybody got what they wanted. Mrs. Massina got something to hold onto in her grief and I got in good with the kids. I got to be good friends with some of them. And some of them I was able to help go straight. One of the members is now a labor organizer and every time things get hot for me somewhere, he calls me up and growls, "Hey, Saul, you want me to send up some muscle to lean on those motherfuckers?"
That’s Saul Alinsky; the man who had profound influence on both of the two leading Democratic politicians in the 2008 presidential primary, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”
“Interview with Saul Alinsky, Part Four Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Dorothy Day, one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left. Response to our earlier article dealing with Alinsky has been so great that we worked to obtain this extensive interview with him, conducted by Playboy magazine in 1972. It is, by far, the most detailed conversation with Alinsky that we know of. The interview will be appearing in weekly installments here at The Progress Report.
……
PLAYBOY: Why would professional criminals confide their secrets to an outsider?
ALINSKY: Why not? What harm could I do them? Even if I told what I'd learned, nobody would listen. They had Chicago tied up tight as a drum; they owned the city, from the cop on the beat right up to the mayor. Forget all that Eliot Ness shit; the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy. The Federal Government could try to nail 'em on an occasional income tax rap, but inside Chicago they couldn't touch their power. Capone was the establishment. When one of his boys got knocked off, there wasn't any city court in session, because most of the judges were at the funeral and some of them were pallbearers. So they sure as hell weren't afraid of some college kid they'd adopted as a mascot causing them any trouble. They never bothered to hide anything from me; I was their one-man student body and they were anxious to teach me. It probably appealed to their egos.
Once, when I was looking over their records, I noticed an item listing a $7500 payment for an out-of-town killer. I called Nitti over and I said, "Look, Mr. Nitti, I don't understand this. You've got at least 20 killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money to bring somebody in from St. Louis?" Frank was really shocked at my ignorance. "Look, kid," he said patiently, "sometimes our guys might know the guy they're hitting, they may have been to his house for dinner, taken his kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together. But you call in a guy from out of town, all you've got to do is tell him, 'Look, there's this guy in a dark coat on State and Randolph; our boy in the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly and fade into the crowd.' So that's a job and he's a professional, he does it. But one of our boys goes up, the guy turns to face him and it's a friend, right away he knows that when he pulls that trigger there's gonna be a widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping -- Christ, it'd be murder." I think Frank was a little disappointed by my even questioning the practice; he must have thought I was a bit callous."
More to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.