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By Alun John, Sumeet Chatterjee and Lawrence White
HONG KONG / LONDON (Reuters) – The shares of HSBC and Standard Chartered on Monday fell to their lowest point since 1998 after the media reported that they and other banks, adding Barclays and Deutsche Bank, had transferred giant sums of allegedly illicit budget in nearly two decades despite red flags about the origin of the money.
BuzzFeed and other press articles referred to suspicious activity reports (SAR) filed through banks and other monetary corporations with the U. S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crime Execution Network (FinCen)But it’s not the first time
HSBC’s london inventories fell 3. 6% to their lowest point since the 1998 Asian currency crisis. Inventory has now halved since the beginning of the year.
StanChart fell 3. 6%, also to its lowest point in 22 years, amid a sale on the market with the STOXX index of European banks falling by 4%.
More than 2,100 SARs, which are necessarily evidence of irregularities in themselves, were received through BuzzFeed News and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other media organizations.
In a statement to Reuters on Sunday, HSBC said that “all data provided through ICIJ is historical. “The bank said that from 2012 he embarked on a “multi-year adventure to review his ability to deal with monetary crime. “
StanChart said in a statement that he took his “responsibility to combat monetary crime incredibly seriously and has invested substantially in our compliance programs. “
Barclays said he believed he had complied with “all of his legal and regulatory obligations, with respect to U. S. sanctions. “
The largest amount of SARS in the cache was at Deutsche Bank, whose shares fell by 5. 2% on Monday. In a statement on Sunday, Deutsche Bank said ICIJ had “reported on a number of historical problems. “
“We have faithful resources to strengthen our controls and we are very focused on assembling our day-to-day work and obligations,” said a bank spokesman.
London-based HSBC and StanChart, among global banks, have paid billions of dollars in fines in recent years for violating U. S. sanctions on Iran and anti-money laundering rules.
Media reports come at a difficult time for HSBC and StanChart, any of which are making the most of their profits in Asia and are recovering from the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, tensions between the United States and China, and political uncertainty in Hong Kong. .
The archives contained data on more than $2 trillion in transactions between 1999 and 2017, which were reported through internal compliance of monetary institutions as suspects.
ICIJ reported that the leaked documents represented only a small fraction of the reports submitted to FinCEN. HSBC and StanChart were among the five banks that made the most impression on the documents, ICIJ reported.
FIGHT AGAINST FINANCIAL CRIME
The SAR showed that banks moved the budget of corporations registered in tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands, and did not know the final account owner, according to the report.
Primary bank staff used Google searches to locate who was behind primary transactions, he said.
In some cases, banks continued to move the illicit budget even after U. S. officials warned them that they could face prosecution by criminals if they continued to deal with criminals or corrupt regimes, he said.
In recent years, global banks have increased their investments in the generation and body of workers to meet the most stringent regulatory needs in combating cash laundering and sanctions around the world.
Thousands of consumers have been evicted from bank accounts in primary wealth centers, adding Hong Kong and Singapore, following a laundering scandal in Malaysia, the disclosure of The Panama Papers and a global boost to fiscal transparency.
FinCen said on his online page on September 1 that he was aware that various media outlets intended to publish a series of illegally disclosed SAD-based articles as well as other documents.
(Report via Alun John, Sumeet Chatterjee and Donny Kwok in Hong Kong and Lawrence White in London; edited by Stephen Coates and Raju Gopalakrishnan)