HSBC goal: End money-laudering suit … with money
Whistleblower: Pay off feds with $1 billion fine, walk free, keep ill-gotten gains
A whistleblower who divulged to WND an international money-laundering scheme by HSBC that now is under federal investigation says he is not impressed with the banking giant’s attempt to resolve the scandal.
John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president and relationship manager in New York, told WND the bank’s strategy is to avoid criminal prosecution by paying the federal government up to $1 billion in fines.
If the bank gets its way, Cruz said, HSBC employees, including senior management, might walk free and avoid surrendering any financial gains from their activities.
“HSBC is trying to put an end to the investigation of money laundering, but, according to my attorney, the voice recordings I made of bank officials and the documents I brought out of the bank are very damaging to the bank,” Cruz told WND.
HSBC has apologized for a “shameful” systems breakdown from 2004 to 2010 and is prepared to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines in a scandal that was exposed in a series of investigative WND reports that began in February. Cruz turned over 1,000 pages of evidence to WND he pulled from a bank computer system before he was fired. He was terminated in 2010, after two years at HSBC, for “poor performance.” But he contends he was let go because senior management didn’t want to him to pursue his personal investigation.
Cruz previously told WND he met with special agents with the IRS criminal division in April and handed over a computer disc with copies of his internal documents. The agents, according to Cruz, were overwhelmed with the volume and detail of the information, calling it “mind-boggling.”
As WND reported, law enforcement authorities sat on Cruz’s allegations until the story was exposed by WND.
Harold
ACGR's "News with Attitude" 
If HSBC acted as a criminal enterprise laundering money, U.S. Government should seize and forfeit HSBC. HSBC executives that knowingly money laundered for Iran and other criminals should have their personal ill gotten gains confiscated. Enough of this corruption where criminal banks and stock brokerage companies that launder money and defraud the public use their corporation’s money to pay fines so they can avoid jail and keep their ill-gotten profits and salaries paid for committing corporate crimes. The U.S. Justice Department needs to set a strong International example that they will not tolerate bank money laundering, fraud and other white-collar crimes by convicting bankers and stock brokerage executives that participate in criminal activities. However that may be a moot point. The Justice Department and Obama Administration won’t even come clean on its Fast & Furious gun running operations that allowed American guns to be sold to Mexican Drug Cartel(s) when it was foreseeable those guns would be used to commit crimes and kill people.