The Dope Trade and the Crown: A Very-British Wealth of Nations

 

BCCI would not keep its title of “the largest bank fraud in world financial history” for very long.

2012 was a record-breaking year for bank fraud. Not only did HSBC pay the largest fine ever paid under the Bank Secrecy Act of $1.9 billion (USD) but the LIBOR scandal would occur a little over a week after. The Swiss bank UBS had to acknowledge its key role in perhaps the biggest antitrust/price-fixing case in history, the LIBOR scandal, a massive interest-rate­rigging conspiracy involving hundreds of trillion of dollars in financial products. As journalist Matt Taibi described it, the “LIBOR scandal, which is at the heart of the UBS settlement, makes Enron look like a parking violation.” Both HSBC’s and UBS’s settlements tied for the gold medal in “the biggest financial scam of all time.”

HSBC is a 19th century British opium bank that was created with its headquarters in Hongkong-Shanghai, as part of the British conquest of China after it lost both Opium Wars, created to facilitate Britain’s trade in opium, something that it continues to be implicated in to this day. HSBC began to make unfavourable headlines when, in 2003, it was ordered by U.S. regulators to strengthen its anti-money-laundering practices and agreed to fix these problems. Instead, HSBC took part in one of the most notorious episodes in money laundering history. As the Mexican drug war metastasized in the mid-2000s, HSBC provided essential U.S. dollar-denominated accounts to narco-gangs who needed to clean hundreds of millions of dollars in drug earnings.  (more...)

The Dope Trade and the Crown: A Very-British Wealth of Nations