zlacker

"The government asked for their cut" actually means that for laundering that $881 million in cartel money - they were fined $1.9 billion and then had to pay an additional $665 million in other civil penalties.

They wouldn't do it again and again because they don't earn $880 million when accepting $880 million in dirty money - remember that bank deposits are liabilities to the bank - they only earn money from interest on that -- and it cost them billions in fines to do so...

>>mikeyo+(OP)
Also, HSBC is selling off all of its consumer banking in Canada largely as a result of the gov't fines and tattered reputation among Canadians.

>>mikeyo+(OP)
Is that enough though?

It seems pretty clear that putting people who commit crimes in jail definitely reduces their chances of commuting crime at least while they're in jail.

White collar crime is the root of all evil in our society and we should be putting white collar criminals in jail.

>>jszymb+q1
> tattered reputation among Canadians

Hardly just Canadians; I first started hearing tales of huge HSBC corruption 20 years ago.

FTR: I bank with First Direct, which is an online banking service of HSBC in the UK.

>>mikeyo+(OP)
I'd be very surprised if the $880M was the extent of the crime. The government not jailing anyone involved in the scheme is completely inexcusable and in my view makes the government complicit in the crime, in which case my trust that the public information about this case is accurate is 0.

>>mikeyo+(OP)
That comes out of the company's wallet, but does it come out of a person's? Persons responsible for committing crimes, not customers or other third party members. HSBC has trillions in holding, so those numbers might not be as big as they appear.

>>user39+i4
The "scheme" was bank tellers in Mexico, working for a recently acquired local bank, accepting boxes full of cash and lying about the origin. HSBC was fined for looking the other way and having shitty controls about suspect funds -- their AML teams were understaffed and they didn't do any real due diligence on the Mexican banking firm they had purchased. The entire executive team was forced out, they clawed back bonuses for everyone in the chain who profited off the shitty controls.

So who would you jail in this case? The bank tellers interfacing with cartel? They're in Mexico anyway. Some overworked compliance manager in the US who ignored the suspicious transactions? Some C-Level exec person who didn't know about the suspicious origin of a billion dollars into a bank with something like 2.5 trillion in assets?

What specific crime do you think they committed?

Nobody likes these global banks, they're run by absolute psychopaths but remember, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. All of the mirror image complaints about banks not wanting to touch Crypto or proceeds from gambling/porn sites is downstream from settlements like these.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

>>godels+h5
They literally clawed back bonuses from all of the executives involved in the compliance failures.

>>user39+i4
HSBC probably got a few percent of that $880M in fees/interest/whatever. So unless they were laundering ~100x more than that, the fines absolutely did make all of that crime (even if it wasn't the full extent of it) net negative for the bank, and probably by a lot.

>>mikeyo+pc
This isn’t accurate. HSBC management trained their employees on how to encode transfers for the cartel organizations to evade the government’s detection mechanisms (by inserting punctuation). So there was more to this scheme than you’re describing.

>>mikeyo+Tc
Oh no their bonuses. I’m sure it was tough not being able to spend the summer in Martha’s Vineyard that year.