4 ms·
Tl;DR: They thought they were laundering money.
by curiousgal 9y ago
Tl;DR: They thought they were laundering money.
- sschueller 9y agoI guess if you are big enough you only get a small fine. e.g. HSBC
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> small fine, e.g. HSBC HSBC was fined nearly $2 billion [1]. (Still a shame none of the complicit went to jail.) https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-examines-hsbcs-881-million-money-laundering-scandal-2018-02-21 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa...
- madaxe_again 9y agoAt their scale, that's a small fine. Barely 10% of annual net profit.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoBetter metric is relative to Mexican, or North American, profits. Those are the markets in which they did their shenanigans. Relative to those, it’s a substantial absolute and relative sum.
- lukeschlather 9y agoIf I'm interpreting the article correctly, they made at least $888 million off of their scheme. It's likely that a significant amount of their illicit profit was not detected by the enforcement agencies, so $2 billion sounds like they potentially profited even factoring in the fine, it's only a little over twice their profit.
- wavefunction 9y agoYou have to make the entire organism pay a price or else it gets laughed off as a temporary setback. Jail these folks, and the folks they reported to. You start throwing some bankers in jail and you'll see some magic "self-regulation" kick in.
- jessaustin 9y agoThe last thing federal prosecutors want to do is make rich and powerful white people worry. They know which side their bread is buttered on.
- busterarm 9y agoHell, Wachovia got off with a $160mil fine and all they had to do was buy and change their name to Wells Fargo!
- acct1771 9y agoAnd the entities that received that fine money? Likely complicit in that some of the laundering themselves. So, what was fixed?
- trhway 9y agoDidn't HSBC get off by permanently opening all it's books/accounts worldwide to USG?
- PeterisP 9y agoFrom a local perspective, they kind of probably were doing so (though no official judgements yet to prove/disprove that). They have a rather limited local presence, but enormous amounts of foreign (Russian&area) deposits that constitute the vast majority of their deals and profit. It's an open question whether the particular deals were technically prohibited or not, but it quite certainly involved handling a large amount of shady money that wasn't freely usable in the west directly and so needed services of this bank.