Tom Burghardt: Fraud, Money Laundering and Narcotics.

Impunity of the Banking Giants. No Prosecution of HSBC. In another shameful decision by the US Department of Justice, earlier this month, federal prosecutors reached a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with UK banking giant HSBC, Europe's largest bank. Shameful perhaps, but entirely predictable. After all, in an era characterized by economic collapse, owing to gross criminality by leading financial actors, policy decisions and the legal environment framing those decisions have been shaped by oligarchs, who quite literally have "captured" the state. Founded in 1865 by flush with cash opium merchants, after the British Crown seized Hong Kong from China, in the aftermath of the First Opium War, HSBC has been a permanent fixture on the radar of US law enforcement, and regulatory agencies for more than a decade. Not that anything so trifling as terrorist financing, or global narco-trafficking  mattered much to the Obama administration. As I peviously reported, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued their mammoth 335 page report, "US Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing, HSBC Case History," we learned that among the "services" offered by HSBC subsidiaries and corresponding banks were sweet deals, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, with financial entities with ties to international terrorism and the grisly drug trade. Charged with multiple violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for their role in laundering blood money for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, as a sideline HSBC's Canary Wharf masters conducted a highly profitable business with the alleged financiers of the 9/11 attacks, who washed funds through Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank. While the media breathlessly reported that the DPA will levy fines totaling some $1.92 billion, which includes $655 million in civil penalties, the largest penalty of its kind ever levied against a bank, under terms  of the agreement, not a single senior officer will be criminally charged. In fact, those fines will be paid by shareholders which include municipal investors, pension funds, and the public at large!