HSBC Is Reverting Back To its Roots Of Financing Criminals.

HSBC Whistleblower Details How HSBC Funds Terrorists And Drug Cartels.

HSBC Holdings’ Mexican branches had become so well-known to drug traffickers as the place to launder proceeds from illicit sales that cartels began using special boxes to speed transactions, US prosecutors said.

From 2006 to 2010, the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico and the Norte del Valle Cartel in Columbia moved more than US$881 million in proceeds through the bank’s US unit, said Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general for the US Justice Department’s criminal division. Breuer, along with US Attorney Loretta Lynch in Brooklyn, New York, announced that the bank had agreed to pay at least US$1.9 billion to settle money laundering probes.

“These traffickers didn’t have to try very hard,” Breuer said at a press conference in Brooklyn. “They would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in a single day into a single account using boxes designed to fit the precise dimension of the tellers’ windows in bank’s Mexico branches.”

U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) was on Bloomberg yesterday with Neil Borofsky talking about the civil fine that Treasury slapped on the bank for laundering money for terrorists and drug cartels.  Both agreed that bank executives should be prosecuted or have a more severe fine than the Treasury is making them pay which they say is equivalent to a less than a day’s profit for HSBC.

Everett Stern, a former employee of HSBC that uncovered and blew the whistle on the company knowingly financing criminals, terrorists and drug cartels.