When I drilled down into the details it looked like the accusations were all just smoke. It's things like "the law said that transactions from this region should be classified as medium risk or low risk depending on the bank's own judgement, and the bank decided to classify them as low risk", or "the bank provided services to company x, which was found out to be part of a criminal enterprise 10 years later". The only "active participation in money laundering" was that a client company asked them how to send wire transfers from Mexico to the US without violating the regulations, and they told them, which far from being a crime is surely what any responsible company would do.
If you've got concrete facts to the contrary then I'd be happy to be corrected, but I'm convinced it's all just political posturing.
The words of Brandon Garrett, a professor at the Duke University of Law, concludes:
> They are recidivists, but they do not receive harsher penalties despite their growing criminal records. Individual criminal defendants are not so lucky.
The article seems to provide factual support to the sentiment, that HSBC has a record of criminal behavior, in legal terms.
> The article seems to provide factual support to the sentiment, that HSBC has a record of criminal behavior, in legal terms.
It doesn't. A deferred-prosecution agreement means that the case never went to court and they didn't admit guilt.
Obviously in theory a company that was confident of their innocence would refuse such an agreement. But the laws are ambiguous, public sentiment is against them, and in practice the industry regulators have a lot of discretion and will make life very hard for you if they decide you're fighting them.
HSBC does seem to have more than their fair share of allegations against them - but in my book circumstantial, ambiguous allegations never amount to a smoking gun even if there's a huge number of them.
If you've got concrete facts to the contrary then I'd be happy to be corrected, but I'm convinced it's all just political posturing.