Tom Burghardt: HSBC Caught in New Drug Money Laundering Scandal

While HSBC's Canary Wharf masters are back peddling furiously over charges that they gave a leg up to terrorist financiers and drug traffickers as a recent US Senate report charged, new evidence emerged that its business as usual for the multinational banking giant, founded by Hong Kong based British opium merchants. Earlier this month, The Independent reported that French police had intercepted one of the dozens of go fast cars which transport cannabis at high speed from Spain to Paris. The seizure banal in itself unraveled an extraordinary network of drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud and tax evasion, which sprawled over the invisible barrier which separates Paris from the city's poor, multiracial suburbs." The bank embroiled in this latest scandal? Why HSBC, of course! According to reporter John Lichfield, "bank notes handed by clients to street drug dealers in the suburbs were ending up, French and Swiss investigators discovered, in the safes of seemingly law abiding, well heeled citizens in the French capital." But that's not the only place where crisp bundles of cash were turning up. "A trio of Moroccan brothers, including a prominent fund manager in Geneva, are alleged to have concocted an elaborate scheme to launder money by balancing two illegal flows of cash," The Independent averred. At the center of this multimillion euro money laundering spider's web were: Meyer El Maleh, the managing director of the fund management firm GPF SA, and brothers Mardoche El Maleh, the alleged bagman of the cannabis for cash scheme and Nessim El Maleh, a fund management specialist with the Swiss private banking arm of HSBC, HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA. The Independent reported that the trio "are suspected of handling up to 12m euros in cash , gold ingots, art treasures and guns."