zlacker

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.

>>user39+(OP)
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...

>>user39+(OP)
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+78
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.