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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 o
by 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 agoI 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.
- Silhouette 10y agoWhy should this be Barclays' problem at all, though? Beyond perhaps some objective criteria for reporting certain financial transactions to the authorities that deal with things like fraud or money laundering, why should anyone other than official government departments be responsible for making any judgement or taking any other action here? Let the appropriate government departments take official legal action if they think there's a real case to be made, and let them cover the costs of that. Let banks provide banking services and banking customers use them. It's really not complicated or unfair, until someone makes it so.
- csomar 10y agoIt is not the banks responsibility. See my other comments. However, this is an incredible show of incompetence. It is easy to make banks responsible of money laundering. Also easy to make them non-responsible of inappropriately holding customers funds. Got a problem with that? You can deal in cash or bitcoins then.
- halomru 10y ago>Got a problem with that? You can deal in cash or bitcoins then. That's an incomplete solution. Cash and Bitcoin are still subject to money laundering regulations. You just reduce the number of instances where they are applied, but you can't completely avoid them
- csomar 10y agoThat was a rather sarcastic comment. As cash is not practical (and can be faced with suspicion) and bitcoin is very speculative.