Wrongdoing at HSBC was no innocent mistake. Green ‘warned in 2005’
Following yesterday’s Slogpost on the subject of Tory Trade & Investment Minister Stephen Green’s time in charge of HSBC’s money laundering, tax-evading crooks clients, jawslog@gmail.com has been inundated with helpful snippets, hints and inside stuff on the workings of the bank during its Mexican Marching Powder, Russian Mafiosi, and Swiss Fraudster years.
A classic example of this is a UK gamekeeper turned poacher who sent me this pertinent advice:
“I was an HM Inspector of Taxes for 12 years and involved in prosecutions. I have been defending the stupid and guilty from HMRC for the last 16 years….HMRC would much rather take in cash than prosecute anyone. You have to be really stupid or very unlucky to get prosecuted by HMRC.”
And judging by the MSM yawn that followed yesterday’s piece, any chance of being collared by Her Majesty’s Rapist Conmen dives rapidly if you are an arse-licker at Dave’s Camerlot Court. Remember: the City of London Police are the lead investigators of financial fraud in the UK. The CLP are answerable to the Corporation of London. The Corporation of London is controlled by City firms. The banks employ by far the most people in the city of London.
And of course, Stephen Green is central to maximising trade contacts and investment opportunities via the Olympics.
Yes, as usual it’s all about the munnneeeeeeee.
But this is not always so in the US – believe it or not: astonishingly, there are still operatives in the FBI and the IRS who take the Eliot Ness view of lowlife….when allowed to by the corrupt Congressional elites. So they’re in luck on this issue, because the Senate Permanent sub-committee on Investigations met yesterday, and scrupulous Senator Carl Levin expounded in detail on the “extensive money laundering activities” of HSBC.
The outline evidence against the Green Baron’s Bank makes a nonsense of the apologist charge that this is all a minor distraction, and part of some ill-defined global conspiracy to pin the blame on an innocent naif.
The Senatorial study makes clear that, while many other banks may have been engaged in similar practices, it appears that HSBC facilitated money laundering “on a global scale that vastly surpasses other banks”.
Some particular extracts are of especial interest:
“HSBC’s Mexico bank, HBMX, was treated by HSBC headquarters in London as a low-risk correspondent bank with HBUS, despite the fact that Mexico is a hub of drug money laundering for all of South America. HBMX provided services to other Mexican banks and casas de cambio, as well as to Cayman Island banks that maintain secrecy jurisdictions. In 2007-2008 alone, Levin told the reporters, $7 billion in physical dollars were transported from HBMX to HBUS. An official of HSBC’s Mexico bank, HBMX, conceded that he believes that 60-70% of all of the drug money laundered from Mexico into the U.S. comes through HSBC.”
Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint had a special responsibility, above and beyond his Chairmanship of HSBC Global, as a director of HBMX.
Also emerging from the Committee’s report are damning details of amoral blind-eye turning in relation to Arab terrorism and the Russian Mob:
“HSBC enjoyed correspondent banking with Al Rahjid Bank in Saudi Arabia, a bank long associated with Al Qaeda both before and after the 9/11 attacks. HSBC also facilitated banned banking transactions with Iran, under an exemption referred to as ‘U-turn transactions’. It further allowed a small regional bank in northern Japan to process billions of dollars in travelers cheques for Russians suspected of being mafia front men.”
So clearly, we aren’t looking at unconsciously careless banking here: only a complete idiot would’ve failed to spot massive deposits and withdrawals in Mexico without realising drugs were involved…and Stephen Green isn’t an idiot. Further, you don’t engineer U-turn deals with a rogue State by accident. Nor can a clerical error explain the calculated choice of a low-profile provincial bank in Japan as the vehicle for laundering Russian mafia money.
There is on the surface (and even below it, I would contend) the same level of credibility problem in this trail of criminality as exists when Bob Diamond, Marcus Agius, Paul Tucker and Mervyn King maintain they knew nothing about Libor rigging. Yet the enervating apathy of the British MSM as regards these revelations (with a big hat-tip to the Telegraph this morning, which nails when Green knew about the skullduggery) has surprised even me. Backbench Labour MP John Mann, who sits on the Treasury Select Committee, has called on Green to quit: “Someone whose bank has been assisting drug cartels and corrupt regimes should not be in charge of a government portfolio,” he said yesterday.
But as ever, the Labour Party under the tentative leadership of Ed Miliband has yet to endorse Mann’s resignation call. “Stephen Green has serious questions to answer,” is the sum total of shadow Treasury minister Chris Leslie’s sense of outrage.
Lest we forget, the Ed Miller Band was gutless bordering on legs-akimbo when the first signs of Newscorp depravity filtered into the mainstream media. Highgate Man is displaying the same degree of cynicism about this case.
“Your help in tough times”? What a load of old bollocks. To be a friend indeed to voters in need, you have to show some courage. Where is the courage required in the Labour Party and the UK’s investigative media?
It’s been a week of silence on the presence of Islamic terror apologists at the heart of the London Olympics, and blackouts of bad news. And now we have lots of media folk looking the other way on the issue of a suspected bank cheat at the heart of Camerlot business development.
It’s been a year of obfuscation in relation to Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks, James Murdoch, Newscorp bribery, Jeremy Hunt’s bias in favour of the BSkyB deal, Coalition policy on the EU, Michael Spencer and Michael Fallon as Libor brokers….and now Baron Green as the former ruler of a bank guilty of pernicious malfeasance on a grand scale.
The common factor in all those names is the protection offered to them by UK Prime Minister David Cameron. As for his main Tory opponents on the Tory Right and the 1922 Committee, we hear not a peep of disapproval about any of this. Thus are the moral ranks in Britain forced to assume that this is perhaps the one dimension of Camerlot they accept and embrace.
So to sum up: the Establishment Right offers no critique of crookery, and the Establishment Left lacks the bottle to condemn it uneqivocally.
I cannot think of a better rationale for being a radical realist desirous of clearing all of them out.
The Slog 