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> ...if criminal behaviour is suspected, facilities can be legally withdrawn. This is unacceptable. The UK government has pushed all the risk to the bank, and

• Silhouette 10y ago
  Indeed. I think it would be helpful if our society could have some forum that would make an officially recognised determination of whether someone suspected of criminal activity had actually committed those criminal acts, based on the available evidence either way, on a case by case basis. That same forum would also be well placed to determine any temporary measures that were necessary and proportionate to protect the interests of all concerned until it reached its final decision. I don't think commercial service providers are likely to be a good choice for that forum, though. We should probably consider something else.
• retube 10y ago
  It's a direct result of the regulatory and reputational risks that banks now face. Threatened with multi-billion dollar fines for facilitating money laundering they're not taking any chances.
  • rlpb 10y ago
    Sure. What I'm saying is that the bank should also face consequential damages when they suspend an account for an extended period of time without a criminal standard of proof. This will help redress the balance. Instead of them "not taking any chances", they will be forced to consider the situation and make a real determination.
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      Anti-money laundering laws explicitly do not require a criminal standard of proof. This is by design - governments and in particular the US government which insists on all this stuff regardless of what other countries thing absolutely love a system that fights crime, as they see it, without all the hassle of due process and court cases. AML account closures only require 'suspicion', for example, a name match against a blacklist compiled by a government agency is 'suspicious' even if it wouldn't hold up in a traditional court of law.
      • rlpb 10y ago
        And what I'm saying is that government-sanctioned removal of services upon citizens who have broken no law should not be tolerated in a society that values the rule of law.
        • zigzigzag 10y ago
          I absolutely agree. Unfortunately convincing governments to roll back anti-money laundering laws would be like pulling teeth. They only ever make them more aggressive.
  • wavefunction 10y ago
    I suppose the many banks that have been fined for _actively_ laundering money shouldn't have done that then, casting a pall as it has over the entire industry. It's always 'boohoo the Banks are so troubled' but how hard is it to refrain from actively laundering money for drug cartels or third world despots or any number of other illicit sources? How hard is it to refrain from rigging the LIBOR or selling sub-prime CDOs to your clients to clear your own books after marking years of profit building up another debt bubble? I have very little patience or sympathy for the modern banking industry and their travails screwing the rest of us over, and getting off with rather unimpressive fines, if we're honest. This guy had his entire account seized. What if the banks were fined commensurate to their profits and they really started to feel the pinch? That, combined with personal liability for the officers involved with these scandals would certainly clean the problem up expeditiously.
    • retube 10y ago
      You realise that no bank was fined for _actively_ laundering money? And by that I mean there was no institutional conspiracy to do so. The money laundering that occurred was facilitated by a very small number of low-level staff who hid what were doing (e.g cashiers in branches), plus a slightly larger number who didn't pick up the activity. What the banks were fined for was insufficient controls to detect laundering, not laundering itself. Banks process 100s of millions of transactions a day, including taking large numbers of cash deposits in developing countries like Mexico. It is _incredibly_ hard to build a framework which reliably detects suspicious activity without a lot of false positives. But given the potential repercussions, banks are being very cautious. They cannot afford more scandals.
      • Spooky23 10y ago
        So HSBC helped drug cartels launder a billion dollars due to the actions of a few tellers? No way. Even a cursory examination will find many cases where banks were suspected of actively facilitating criminal activity.
      • EdHominem 10y ago
        >You realise that no bank was fined for _actively_ laundering money? And no banker was jailed for 2008. > And by that I mean there was no institutional conspiracy to do so. That simply means that the conspiracy was too big to reasonably punish. Too many friends of the prosecution would have been hurt, so miraculously nobody was charged. > But given the potential repercussions, banks are being very cautious. They cannot afford more scandals. Which is what the OP was saying. We've dumped risk on the banks and now they're hurting legitimate customers to avoid that risk. And because it's essentially mandatory to have a bank, customers are being forced to use services that - like Paypal - will hold their money for months or years without feedback simply because they can. They don't care that they freeze your accounts and you can't pay your mortgage, they're indemnified against claims from customers. "Oh, sorry, it was vaguely related to anti-money laundering. Check back in 90 days." It's almost like our governments are trying to make us use non-bank solutions.
  • toss1 10y ago
    Great, they now face regulatory and reputational risks, and rightly so. They should be allowed to take steps to prevent themselves from unwittingly supporting laundering, terrorism, etc. However, those steps should not include STEALING THEIR CUSTOMERS' MONEY, which is no less than this bank did until contacted by the media. If they decide the person or transaction is insufficiently verifiable to accept, hold, or move the money, fine. Refuse to keep the funds and RETURN THEM TO THE OWNER. Keeping the funds is simply theft. This is no better than the "asset forfeiture" going on in US police departments who are behaving as robbery gangs.
• andybak 10y ago
  > without a criminal standard of evidence. That might have to go hand in hand with similar time scales and costs of the legal system. Imagine the delay and cost if this had been handled in court. Mr Rahman would still be waiting for a court date and paying an expensive solicitor to prepare his case.
  • rlpb 10y ago
    The onus would be on Barclays to make a case. Since they don't have a case, nothing would happen, and Rahman would still have access to his money. The course of events would be: 1. Rahman receives £500,000. 2. Rahman withdraws £60,000. 3. Barclays considers this suspicious, so suspends Rahman's account for seven days pending further investigation. 4. Rahman presents his evidence of where he got the money in the hope of his account being released in under seven days. 5. Whether Barclays accepts Rahman's evidence or not, they fail to gather a criminal standard of evidence against Rahman within seven days, so release his account anyway, since to keep his account suspended further would be illegal. If Barclays does not do 5, then sure, Rahman will end up in the same situation now. He'll spend the same amount of time as he did already in getting it resolved. However, when he does get it resolved, Barclays' settlement will include consequential damages for the house he failed to purchase because of Barclays' illegal suspension of his account. As it stands, since keeping Rahman's account suspended was not illegal for Barclays, they don't really owe him anything, so his settlement is much smaller and he is still out of pocket because his house purchase failed through as a consequence. > Imagine the delay and cost if this had been handled in court. The court would have nothing to handle, so Rahman would incur no delay or cost.
    • csomar 10y ago
      I don't think the government will like that. It'll put Barclays in a lose-lose situation. If they are not careful with flagged transactions, they get fined heavily. If they are careful and mistakes happen, they get fined heavily. Better give them an option where they can be reckless and it has no consequences for the legal system.
      • 10y ago
• sametmax 10y ago
  Well, we let them write undemocratic laws for security reasons because "terrorism". It's our fault.
  • Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    That's not how it started though. Here's how things went: * government made out of parties voted for because $reason * 9/11 happened * government takes measures because terrorism 9/11 (and co) was one of those things few people - especially voters - could've predicted, and in many ways it forced the government's hands - our country is under attack, lots of angry people want to cause trouble, etc. Mind you, I don't think there's been any strong "we are going to reduce anti-terrorism measures" parties, or if they were they weren't popular.
    • ashark 10y ago
      > Mind you, I don't think there's been any strong "we are going to reduce anti-terrorism measures" parties, or if they were they weren't popular. There almost can't be. All it takes is one attack of any kind after they relax rules, regardless of whether the relaxation allowed it to happen, and they lose every. single. election. the next cycle.
• wheelerwj 10y ago
  It's not just the UK. This is happening in the US too.
• gutnor 10y ago
  This is the same with laws like no education for illegal immigrant. Outside any humane argument, technically the schools are not equipped to determine the legal status of every child parents. Even outside any malicious application (which is by itself a wide opened door) it becomes a forced legal discrimination: the school cannot afford to take risk on children in case they lose their government allowance if his parents are found illegal.