THE HUFFINGTON POST COVERED A MORE RECENT EXAMPLE

HSBC supposedly said "we'll never, ever do it again" after paying the five-week fine -- but this was not the case.

One year later, HSBC was again fined for blatantly financing terrorism. This was directly due to Everett Stern's brave efforts to share the truth.

The story even made it to the Huffington Post, proving this is not an "Internet Conspiracy Theory."

Judge John Gleeson obviously was unable to successfully monitor HSBC after his 1.9B judgment against them was filed and they paid the settlement.

Everett Stern is an example of someone who did the right thing. He discovered HSBC was transferring hundreds of millions of dollars of funds to a variety of terrorist organizations, and he reported it.

Notice how HSBC attempts to take credit for this, saying this data was "voluntarily reported" -- when in fact it was only thanks to Stern, a Snowden-type whistleblower, that it was released:

12/18/13: HSBC Gets Small Fine for Terrorist Transactions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/18/hsbc-terrorists_n_4467329.html

A major U.S. bank has agreed to a settlement for transferring funds on the behalf of financiers for the militant group Hezbollah, the Treasury Department announced on Tuesday.

Concluding that HSBC's actions "were not the result of willful or reckless conduct," Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control accepted a $32,400 settlement from the bank.

Treasury noted, as did HSBC in a statement to HuffPost, that the violations were voluntarily reported.

Everett Stern, a former HSBC compliance officer who complained to his supervisors about the Hezbollah-linked transactions, told HuffPost he was "ecstatic and depressed at the same time."

"Those are my transactions, I reported them," he said, satisfied that the government was taking action.

But, he added, "Where I am upset was those were a handful of transactions, and I saw hundreds of millions of dollars" being transferred.

Stern said he hopes the government's enforcement actions against HSBC have not come to an end with the latest settlement.

"They admit to financing terrorism and they get fined $32,000. Where if I were to do that, I would go to jail for life," he said.

HSBC's fine is less than the $40,165.07 covered in the settlement agreement that the bank transferred between December 2010 and April 2011 on behalf of a development company that Treasury says serves as a front for some of Hezbollah's biggest financiers in Africa.

And the government watchdog's claim that HSBC committed no "substantially similar apparent violations" in the past five years is likely to raise some eyebrows.

In December 2012, the bank agreed to pay a $1.9 billion settlementfor moving money that a 2012 Senate report found had likely helped drug cartels and a Saudi Arabian bank the CIA has linked to al Qaeda.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 863