واشنطون تطلب من مصارف سودانية معلومات عن عملائها

Quote: If anyone doubts the human costs of fraud, they should consider the story of a New Jersey man whose daughter died when the bus she was riding in Gaza was blown up. The father, Stephen Flatow, spent years tenaciously pulling together fragments of information to determine who was to blame for his daughter Alisa’s death in 1995. Flatow’s investigation led him to conclude that Iran had funded the terrorist group that was responsible for his daughter’s death, according to a recent New York times story. Last week, BNP Paribas –one of the world’s largest banks – admitted that it enabled Iran to move funds around the world and hid those transactions from US regulators. A front group acting as a charity in New York provided cover for the toxic relationships. US sanctions prohibit such financial transactions with Iran as well as a number of other countries, such as Syria, Sudan and North Korea. As US Attorney General Eric Holder said: BNP went to elaborate lengths to conceal prohibited transactions, cover its tracks, and deceive U.S. authorities. They used “cover payments” to hide the involvement of sanctioned entities in transactions that were processed through New York and elsewhere in the United States. They worked with partners and subsidiaries around the world to structure transactions in needlessly complicated ways – using sophisticated techniques that served no legitimate business purpose, but that allowed them to obscure the truth: that these transactions violated the law and should not have been occurring in the first place. Money laundering and the evasion of sanctions by Wall Street banks are not new allegations. Prior to BNP’s settlement, a string of banks – including HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays andStandard Chartered– admitted they had engaged in similar illegal transactions on behalf of Iran, Libya, Sudan and other countries or sanctioned entities within those countries. Without Wall Street’s help to move billions of dollars around the globe without detection, those countries’ ability to fund terrorist and criminal organizations would have been disrupted, hurting those groups’ operations.  Many lives would have been spared – perhaps even Alisa Flatow’s. In BNP’s case, the bank processed thousands of illegal transactions for sanctioned entities in Iran, Sudan and Cuba. BNP’s guilty plea and $8.9 billion penalty must be cold comfort for Mr. Flatow. While the amount of fines is a headline grabber, it delivered just a minor sting and may do little to deter other large financial institutions from engaging in similar types of misconduct. BNP’s share price bumped up on the news of the settlement, and the bank will keep dividends at last year’s level, indicating that while the financial incentives to break the law are great, the penalties — even in BNP’s case — are relatively small. A former attorney who spent 77 months in prison for money laundering and now consults on compliance told the Wall Street Journal that he thinks many of the bankers who attend his talks on money laundering are there to learn techniques for laundering funds and evading detection by law enforcement agencies. This says that the only message the bankers are hearing, despite the prosecution of major banks and record fines, is that they must learn to cheat better. It’s no wonder. Even in the BNP case, not one employee was held criminally accountable despite the magnitude of the wrongdoing. The only consequence to employees was that some were demoted and 13 lost their jobs – and that was only at the insistence of regulators. Until the profit is drained from financial crimes like BNP’s and executives at banking institutions are routinely held personally accountable for those crimes, little will change. Bankers are so removed from the impact of their wrongdoing that they don’t feel the pain of Mr. Flatow, victims of terrorism or even US investors and consumers in cases where bankers’ criminal or fraudulent actions hurt them.A big bank business card isn’t a license to lie, cheat and steal.