Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity applauded the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations today on this week’s hearing, “U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History.” The hearing painted a picture of a bank that chose profit over protection, failing to apply legally mandated anti-money laundering protections to many of its accounts.

Reporter Chad Bouchard wrote an excellent piece covering Tuesday’s HSBC hearing in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Committee presented the results of its investigation of HSBC, the international banking giant, that included over a million pieces of evidence, mostly in the form of emails between executives, showing patterns of non-compliance to laws and regulations, as well inadequate implementations of anti-money laundering safeguards. Bouchard breaks down the hearing, pointing out HSBC’s willingness to do business with rogue regimes, their failures to comply with good banking practices, as well as failures by U.S. regulators to put an end...

Stefanie Ostfeld of Global Witness, member of the Task Force, had a great Op-Ed published in The Hill on Tuesday. She outlines the recent HSBC hearing involving money laundering and terrorist financing allegations against the bank. HSBC’s failure to comply with regulations or put in place safeguards against these types of illicit activities not only promotes a dirty global financial system, but it opens up the U.S. financial system to these criminals.

Senator Carl Levin (aka “Watchdog of America”) is at it again. Yesterday morning the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Senator Levin (D-MI) chairs, held a hearing to investigate HSBC, the UK-based bank and Europe’s largest financial institution, which has allegedly systematically (and knowingly) lapsed its anti-money laundering systems and allowed suspicious transactions into the United States. According to the subcommittee’s investigative report released Monday, HSBC systematically ignored warnings and failed to stop illegal behavior many times between 2001 and 2010. The report found HSBC accepted deposits intoU.S. branches from Mexican drug cartels, Saudi Arabian banks with terrorist ties,...