According to press reports that quoted confidential documents submitted by banks to the US government, several international banks have transferred huge sums of money that may have been illegal over a period of about 20 years, despite warnings about the origins of these funds.
According to "Reuters", the reports of BuzzFeed News and other media outlets were based on leaked documents on suspicious activities that banks and other financial companies brought to the financial crime network at the US Treasury Department.
According to press reports, the number of these documents exceeds 2,100. BuzzFeed has obtained them and reviewed by the International Federation of Investigative Journalists and other media organizations.
The association said the reports contained information on transactions in excess of $ 2 trillion, and compliance departments had warned financial institutions that they were suspicious. Reports are not necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. The union stated that the leaked documents are only a small percentage of the reports submitted to the Treasury unit.
Five international banks appeared in the documents in abundance, namely, "HSBC", "JP Morgan Chase", "Deutsche Bank", "Standard Chartered" and "Bank of New York Mellon", according to the union.
The STRs provide important information as part of the global effort to combat money laundering and other crimes. Media reports published yesterday painted a picture of an under-resourced and overburdened mechanism, allowing huge sums of illicit money to move through the banking system.
The transactions highlighted in the reports include money transferred by JP Morgan to potentially corrupt individuals and companies in Venezuela, Ukraine and Malaysia, hierarchical fraud transfers through HSBC, and money linked to a Ukrainian billionaire around Deutsche Bank.
HSBC said in a statement that all the information mentioned by the union is historical, indicating that the bank began in 2012 a journey that lasted several years to reform its ability to combat financial crimes in more than 60 sectors.
Bank of New York Mellon told Reuters that it could not comment on specific reports, adding, "We are fully committed to all relevant laws and regulations and assist the authorities in the important work they are doing."
"We take our responsibility to combat financial crime very seriously and have invested heavily in compliance programs," Standard Chartered said in a statement.
While JP Morgan confirmed in a statement that he devoted thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars to this important work, adding, "We have played a leading role in reforming anti-money laundering."
Deutsche Bank said in a statement that the union "has published a number of historical issues. We have devoted huge resources to strengthening supervision and focus on fulfilling our responsibilities and obligations."
The international investigative journalistic investigation revealed that huge amounts of illegal funds flowed for years through the largest banking institutions in the world, denouncing the large loopholes in the laws of the banking sector, which criminals easily exploit, according to the "French".
The investigation, conducted by BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), with the participation of 108 media organizations from 88 countries, said that "the profits of the bloody drug gang wars, the looted wealth from developing countries and the savings that their owners worked hard to collect and then were made."The fraudulent robbery of Ponzi, all this money was allowed to flow to and from these banking institutions, despite the warnings of the employees of these banks."
BuzzFeed wrote in the introduction to the investigation, "These documents that banks have collected and have been shared with governments, but kept out of public view, reveal gaps in bank protection measures and their ease of exploitation by criminals."
The documents, called the "Vincent Files", talk about transfers of about two trillion dollars of suspicious funds that were circulating between 1999 and 2017.
BuzzFeed News stated that "the networks through which dirty money passes around the world have become a vital artery for the global economy." Deutsche Bank responded in a statement that the ICIJ disclosure was "well known" by its regulatory officials.
They added, "He has allocated significant resources to strengthening our monitoring methods, as well as focusing on fulfilling our responsibilities and obligations."
The investigation stressed that the US authorities lack the necessary powers to control dirty money transfers. "The unauthorized disclosure of reports of suspicious activities is a crime that could harm the national security of the United States," the US Financial Crime Agency "Vincent" said in a statement issued before the investigation was published.
The reports said that the set of leaked files reveal major weaknesses in the global war against international money laundering operations.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists said that the files showed how banks, many of which are household names, transferred "enormous sums of illicit cash" to criminals involved in organized crime and individuals subject to US sanctions.
The union added that despite the strict regulations, major banks have also accepted suspected criminals as clients and remitted billions of dollars to them. The report revealed that banks were also reluctant to report such suspicious transactions to the authorities, and sometimes they did so after a delay of years.
The German Tax Justice Network, which has been reporting shortcomings in fighting money laundering at the international level for years, said it was not surprised by this information.
Marcus Meinzer of the network confirmed that the leak gave "a terrible idea about the central role of the American financial system as the engine room for global money laundering."
"If organized crime infiltrates the economy and corrupt people plunder their countries with the help of Western banks, freedom and democracy will be threatened everywhere. The constitutional state must finally take money laundering seriously and punish it seriously," he added.
