Autumn is looking good for some:
©2012 Am Ang Zhang
New York Times:
DECEMBER 11, 2012
Federal
and state authorities announced on Tuesday that they had secured a record $1.92
billion payment from HSBC to
settle charges that the British banking giant transferred billions of dollars
for sanctioned nations, facilitated Mexican drug cartels to launder tainted money
and worked with Saudi Arabian banks with ties to terrorist organizations.
The case,
a major victory for the government, represents the conclusion of a multi-agency
investigation. It convened the Justice Department, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, bank
regulators and the Treasury Department.
In a
filing in Federal District Court
in Brooklyn, federal prosecutors said the bank
had agreed to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement and to forfeit $1.26
billion. The four-count criminal information filed in the court charged HSBC
with failure to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, failure to
conduct due diligence on its foreign correspondent affiliates and violating
sanctions and the Trading With the Enemy Act.
“HSBC is being held accountable for stunning
failures of oversight – and worse – that led the bank to permit narcotics
traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through HSBC
subsidiaries, and to facilitate hundreds of millions more in transactions with
sanctioned countries, ” Lanny A. Breuer, the head of the Justice Department’s
criminal division, said in a statement
At the
upper echelons of the organization, the Senate report found, some bank
executives had ignored warning signs and permitted the illegal behavior to
continue unabated from 2001 to 2010.
Something strange
here:
Lord Green, was HSBC's chairman from 2006 to 2010, after
serving as its chief executive between 2003 and 2006. He is the current UK trade
minister.
More:
Despite a
chorus of warnings from federal banking regulators about the vulnerability of
HSBC’s operations throughout the world, the bank didn’t fortify its controls,
the Senate report found.
One of
HSBC’s branches in the Cayman Islands, the Senate report said, had virtually
no oversight despite holding roughly 50,000
client accounts.
Other banks:
Standard
Chartered: fined $340m (£203m) to settle federal charges that it laundered money
on behalf of four countries, including Iran, that were subject to US
economic sanctions.
That deal
covered currency transactions made at the bank's New York branch for Iranian, Sudanese,
Libyan and Burmese entities from 2001 to 2007.
ING Bank
NV, agreed to pay $619m (£384.8m) to settle allegations that it violated
sanctions against countries including Cuba
and Iran.
Not just banks:
IR-2005-83, Updated: 14-Aug-2012
WASHINGTON —
KPMG LLP (KPMG) has admitted to criminal wrongdoing and agreed to pay $456 million in fines, restitution and
penalties as part of an agreement to defer prosecution of the firm, the Justice
Department and the Internal Revenue Service announced today.
In the largest criminal tax case ever
filed, KPMG has admitted that it engaged in a fraud that generated at least $11
billion dollars in phony tax losses which, according to court papers, cost the United States
at least $2.5 billion dollars in evaded taxes. In addition to KPMG’s former
deputy chairman, the individuals indicted today include two former heads of
KPMG’s tax practice and a former tax partner in the New York, NY
office of a prominent national law firm.
By David Glovin - April 2, 2009 00:01 EDT
April 2
(Bloomberg) -- Former KPMG LLP senior manager John Larson was sentenced to 10
years in prison and former partner Robert Pfaff got eight years for selling
illegal shelters that helped wealthy clients evade more than $100 million in
taxes.
Larson
was also fined $6 million yesterday in Manhattan
federal court, Pfaff was fined $3 million and both were immediately jailed.
Lawyer Raymond Ruble, a former partner at Brown & Wood LLP, was given a 6
1/2-year sentence. The three were convicted on Dec. 17 of tax fraud and other
charges.
“All
three defendants were central” to the tax shelter scheme, U.S. District
Judge Lewis Kaplansaid in court. “They were instrumental in moving it through
the KPMG bureaucracy.”
HSBC:
Independent
FRIDAY 20 JULY 2012
Lord
Green urged to explain how much he knew about shamed bank's money laundering.
Profile:
The banker who balances God and Mammon
Lord Green is not your everyday
banker. He couldn't be further from the profession's image of immoral,
bonus-fuelled money-grubbers.
Unfailingly courteous, cerebral and
deeply religious, the tall and bone-thin peer sometimes seemed like one of the
better sorts of civil servant when he was running the world's local bank. Which
is what he was for a number of years (at the Ministry of Overseas Development)
having first spent a year working in a hostel for alcoholics where he met his
wife, Joy. From there, he joined McKinsey, the management consultancy, where he
spent five years and earned a passport into the fast track of finance. He joined
HSBC in 1982 and was on the board within 16 years with responsibility for
investment banking. He became chief executive in 2003, and, three years later,
executive chairman.
Yet the contradictions presented by
his faith – he is an ordained minister – and his career never left him. He
found the time to pen two books – Serving God, Serving Mammon, reconciling his
career with this faith, and Good Value: Choosing a Better Life in Business.
Perhaps some of his colleagues should have read them, then the bank's issues
may not have arisen.
He is the current UK trade minister.
KPMG:
The Government has
appointed KPMG UK chairman John
Griffith-Jones as the first chair designate of the Financial Conduct
Authority.
Griffith-Jones will join
the FSA board on September 1, 2012 as a non-executive director and deputy chair.
