Big banks and accounting firms launder money, sometimes for countries designated as terrorists. The feds fine them. No no one goes to prison. This is corruption at the highest levels of finance and government. Our government is running a protection racket. Banksters get to continue their business as usual after paying money to the government.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers was fined a ludicrously low $25 million fine for aiding a Japanese bank in laundering money for Iran, Sudan, and Myanmar. The PWC director, now a partner, at the center of this still works for the company and was not criminally indicted.This is outrageous.
In May 2008, the Japanese bank told PwC that it had a written policy to strip wire messages of any information that related to countries blacklisted by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, according to the settlement.
The auditors then let the bank’s lawyers dictate specific parts of the report, scrubbing any mention of any special instructions to it employees and said that the data was complete and their methodology was appropriate.
Fedex charged with money laundering. Feds say Fedex knowingly shipped illegal drugs from online pharmacies. And, you guessed it, no executives have been charged.
The three money laundering charges allege the online pharmacies paid their FedEx bills with money obtained illegally.
FedEx Corp. already was facing 15 conspiracy and drug charges that were filed last month for allegedly shipping powerful sleep aids, sedatives, pain killers and other drugs needing prescriptions to use. Rival UPS Inc. paid $40 million last year to resolve similar allegations.
Banks are supposedly under pressure from US regulators to cut down on laundering money from casinos. Really? Our toothless enforcement agencies would of course never attempt to put such criminals in prison, thus their efforts are next to useless. Even so, banksters manage to whine how unfair it is for them to be treated as criminals just because many of them have been laundering money.
Standard Chartered Chief Executive of Asia, Jaspal Bindra, said the penalties are unfair.
“We are supposed to police that our counterparties and clients are not money laundering,” said Bindra, “and if when we are policing we have a lapse, we don’t get treated like a policeman who’s had a lapse, we are treated like a criminal.”