I kept forgetting to post this. It’s Matt Taibbi’s take on the HSBC settlement (naturally, with no criminal charges!) and what it all means. Go read it all:
If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
The banks’ laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC’s Mexican branches and “deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.”
This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the “legitimate” banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank’s teller windows. Tony Montana’s henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional “American City Bank” in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain’s most storied financial institutions.
HSBC tried to screw me out of the value of a 4-figure wire transfer, saying that the routing number was incorrect (one digit was inadvertently doubled). That was true, meaning that the number of digits did not correspond to any bank account, so that it could not have been sent to anyone else either. They should have immediately notified the sender of the incorrect account number, and asked for a correction.
Instead, the debited the sender but did not credit my account.
IOW, they were sitting on the money, hoping that I and the sender would eventually give up.
After several months of back and forth, they finally releted and paid me.
What a bunch of chiseling crooks, both on a moderate scale and on a huge one.