Why You Should Care: HSBC Bad Banking

[marmar]

Published on Aug 1, 2012 by RussiaToday

A certain bank's lax policies have put money into the hands of some bad men and one particular robot. Will Tim be able to teach his creation the hazards of unregulated banking?

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[Systematic Chaos]

2. HSBC can suck my balls.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Black Dossier: HSBC & Terrorist Finance

(Also posted in Good Reads Forum)

Founded in 1865 when the British Crown seized Hong Kong as a colony in the aftermath of the First Opium War, British merchants (today we'd call them drug lords) needed a bank to handle the brisk trade in the illicit substance and launched the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Company Limited. Rebranded "HSBC" in 1991, the bank expanded at breakneck speed in the heady days after The Wall fell.

While some might call them a success story, exemplars of financial wizardry in tough economic times, more appropriately perhaps, we might borrow a term from Mafia lore to describe their preeminent position in the capitalist pantheon of corrupt institutions: juiced.

Today, the "War on Drugs" rivals the "War on Terror" for top spot on the global hypocrisy index.

snip

That 335-page report, "U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History," (large pdf file available here) was issued after a year-long Senate investigation zeroed-in on the bank's U.S. affiliate, HSBC Bank USA, N.A., better known as HBUS.

Drilling down, we learned that amongst the "services" offered by HSBC subsidiaries and correspondent banks were sweet deals with financial entities with terrorist ties; the transportation of billions of dollars in cash by plane and armored car through their London Banknotes division; the clearing of sequentially-numbered travelers checks through dodgy Cayman Islands accounts for Mexican drug lords and Russian mafiosi.


More at: http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.ca/2012/07/black-dossier-hsbc-terrorist-finance.html

[HopeHoops]

4. Funny, but true. I loved the CD's and memory chip for a face.