
Banks doing business in the United States submit the confidential reports to an intelligence office within the U.S. The investigation is based on a review of dozens of leaked suspicious activity reports, or SARs, as well as interviews with more than a dozen former HSBC anti-money-laundering employees. “Though we have made significant improvements in our financial crime compliance programme, we are continually seeking ways to improve,” the bank said in a statement. The bank told ICIJ that it increased its compliance staff from a few hundred members in 2012 to several thousand in 2017 and invested more than $1 billion in compliance initiatives since 2015. “HSBC is a much safer institution than it was in 2012.” “Starting in 2012, HSBC embarked on a multi-year journey to overhaul its ability to combat financial crime,” said Heidi Ashley, a spokesperson for the bank. In a statement, HSBC defended changes the bank made under the monitorship. More than $900 million of that total involved shell companies linked to alleged criminal networks, according to an analysis by ICIJ and its media partners. compliance staff, who are charged with monitoring customer activity, filed reports lacking crucial customer information on 16 shell companies that had processed nearly $1.5 billion in more than 6,800 transactions through the bank’s Hong Kong operations alone. Although providing only a partial view of HSBC’s suspicious activity reports, the records show that between 20, HSBC’s U.S. The FinCEN Files investigation found that HSBC’s highly profitable branch in Hong Kong played a key role in keeping the dirty money flowing. What is a tax haven? Offshore finance, explained This occurred even while the bank was on probation and under Cherkasky’s scrutiny. The court named a former top New York state financial crimes prosecutor, Michael Cherkasky.Ī 16-month investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, BuzzFeed News and 108 other media partners has found that HSBC continued to provide banking services to alleged criminals, Ponzi schemers, shell companies tied to looted government funds and financial go-betweens for drug traffickers. In a controversial decision, prosecutors declined to seek an indictment of the bank but instead allowed it to pay a $1.92 billion settlement and serve five years of probation during which its efforts to prevent money laundering would be monitored by a court-appointed watchdog. prosecutors in 2012 that it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least $881 million controlled by the notorious Sinaloa cartel and other Mexican drug gangs. HSBC was profiting from an international criminal scheme even while on probation for having served murderous drug cartels and other criminals. Yet HSBC continued to handle the Ponzi network’s massive flow of dirty money into - and out of - its accounts at the bank.
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It was at least the third in a series of so-called suspicious activity reports that the bank’s internal watchdogs had lodged about WCM over several months. When the Ponzi scheme collapsed, an unlucky investor decided to have him killed.įour days before Pacheco was beaten to death, compliance officers at the global banking giant HSBC raised a warning about millions of dollars flowing into a big-dollar account in Hong Kong controlled by the scammers. Like other victims of the World Capital Market scheme, or WCM, Pacheco energetically promoted the deal to relatives and acquaintances. Local authorities determined that his murder was a consequence of an investment fraud that targeted low-income Latino and Asian immigrants around the world. In March 2014, three men kidnapped Reynaldo Pacheco and bludgeoned his head with rocks, leaving the 44-year-old father of a young daughter dead in a creek bed in California’s Napa County.
