Financial Transparency Coalition

If I told you that while the United States is engaged in a costly war against illegal drugs and the vicious cartels that traffic them, U.S. banks are willfully flouting U.S. and Mexican laws and helping these cartels launder their money, would you believe me? For decades the U.S. has served as a safe haven for the ill-gotten finances of corrupt foreign leaders and their ilk. Former foreign government ministers, military leaders, and corrupt heads of state have mansions, businesses, and bank accounts here. The banks who facilitate much of these activities are required by law to conduct...

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Treasury Department will hold a hearing tomorrow on a proposed rule requiring banks to report information to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on bank accounts held by non-U.S. residents. Currently, U.S. banks are not required to give the U.S. government information about these types of accounts.

This wasn’t meant to happen in the last decade. Money laundering regulation was meant to have stopped the handling of drug cash in the USA. The Patriot Act was meant to have closed down such things. The FATF 49 recommendations were meant to have been in place. But as the Observer reported yesterday, US bank Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, money laundered hundreds of billions for Mexican drug gangs in the USA. And, when the activity was questioned internally from London, the money laundering officer who did so was driven out.

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored