Money laundering and crime, big banks at the center of suspicious transactions

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New York – Large US and international banks have been and continue to be at the center of trillion-dollar suspicious financial transactions. Suspicious because for years, in the face of inadequate controls or unfulfilled commitments, they would in fact have ended up laundering illicit funds. He helped finance criminal groups, oligarchs and shady figures, drug cartels and even terrorist organizations.

Target institutions, according to a large body of internal bank and authority documents that have remained protected by secrecy, include brands such as JP Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon, as well as Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered. The hidden “treasure” that they would have moved with their operations would amount to two billion between 1999 and 2017. At least questionable clients are distributed in 170 countries, with tables of blunt dates and precise figures, which testify to the widespread spread of the phenomenon. . Above all, the aforementioned transactions would have continued despite the strong measures of the US authorities, including fines and reform orders, and the repeated commitments to action taken by financial actors. In fact, these transactions would have generated significant benefits for the banks in question.

To project the haunting new light In the labyrinth of dark finances was the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which mobilized 400 journalists from 110 newspapers and 88 countries with the mission of supervising banks and money laundering and which had already brought to light the so-called Papers of Panama, denouncing the corruption of the world of offshore finance.

The new investigation lasted 16 months. The original and never-before-reported documents on which it is based, known as FinCEN Files, were obtained by Buzzfeed, who shared them with the journalism consortium. ICIJ added that it then took advantage of access to another 17,600 documents received through moles, insiders and courts, or turned over to formal requests in accordance with freedom of information laws. Hundreds of interviews with victims and experts have helped shape the picture. At the heart of the disclosures in the FinCEN Archives are more than 2,100 Suspicious Activity Reports, or RASs (Suspicious Activity Reports), which far from the spotlight are deposited by banks and financial institutions themselves with the Treasury Department and its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network division – FinCEN.

The division is in charge of investigating and combating money laundering and has only held a debate in recent days to strengthen its effectiveness, an indirect sign, according to critics, of frustration in the crusade to clean up finances. they are important because they reflect the concerns of compliance offices and bank officials about the nature, origin and destination of funds, even if they are not themselves evidence of wrongdoing. Also significant is the discovery that they are often referred to the authorities with severe delays with respect to the operations carried out and the transit of capital, thus reducing their effectiveness from the beginning. In addition, the 2,100 reports now filtered and analyzed are the tip of the iceberg of the problem, which is equivalent to 0.02% of the more than 12 million documents on possible suspicious activities presented to the government by the institutions between 2011 and 2017.