NEW
YORK – New revelations are emerging that could implicate Loretta
Lynch, President Obama’s attorney general nominee, in the world’s largest
banking scandal.
As
WND reported, Lynch, as the U.S. attorney for the
Eastern District of New York, oversaw the investigation in 2012 of drug-related
international money laundering allegations against London-based HSBC Holdings
LLC.
As a result of HSBC agreeing to a settlement requiring the
international bank holding company to pay the U.S. government more than $1.2
billion in fines for money laundering, Lynch’s office agreed in return not to
press criminal charges against any bank employee of the U.S.-based HSBC
subsidiary.
The federal government’s
unwillingness to prosecute HSBC was exposed by a former HSBC vice president and
relationship manager in New York, John Cruz, who called the bank a
“criminal enterprise.” Cruz was
ignored by law enforcement authorities until he
brought to WND 1,000 pages of customer account records that document his claims.
HSBC also used its power to temporarily shut down WND.com as
the news site was breaking a series of stories on the mega-bank’s
money-laundering practices.
In a telephone interview with WND, Cruz said the Obama
administration “is continuing to cover up its role in the HSBC money laundering
scandal.”
“The U.S. government never responded
to the evidence I provided of money-laundering activity that I fully documented
with records copied directly from HSBC accounts,” Cruz explained
to WND after learning court papers were
filed Wednesday objecting to the Justice Department stonewalling a FOIA request
for the release of documents that could implicate Lynch in a massive
cover-up of Obama administration involvement in international money-laundering
of Mexican cartel drug money.
Lynch has never explained why the New York U.S. Attorney’s
Office in 2012 chose to ignore the 1,000 pages of customer account records Cruz
pulled from the HSBC computer system before he was fired by HSBC senior
management uninterested in investigating his claim to have discovered illegal
money-laundering activity at the bank.
“The official response of the IRS Whistleblower Office
doesn’t say there was no fraud or tax evasion committed by HSBC in the
money-laundering case,” Cruz explained. “The IRS simply says, ‘In this case,
the information you provided did not result in the collection of any
proceeds.’”
Cruz began working at HSBC on Jan. 14, 2008, and was
terminated for “poor job performance” on Feb. 17, 2010.
In his position as an account relationship manager, Cruz
worked in the HSBC southern New York region, a region that accounts for
approximately 50 percent of HSBC’s North American revenue, and was assigned to
work with several branch managers to identify accounts where HSBC might
introduce additional banking services.
“I have firsthand knowledge and proof of how HSBC
transferred billions of dollars through accounts linked to companies that did
not exist,” Cruz explained to WND.
“I had poor job performance because the portfolio of HSBC
accounts I was given to work ended up being 90 percent fictitious and
fraudulent accounts. How could I expand HSBC bank relations with fraudulent
accounts that were created to be used for illegal money laundering?”
The HSBC customer account records handed over to WND by Cruz
detail how HSBC employees, including senior management, have perpetrated a
massive and continuing international money-laundering scheme involving
thousands of accounts and billions of dollars.
“In the year I worked with HSBC, I came to understand how
the money-laundering was facilitated not just by branch managers, but also by
senior officers of the bank within the United States and internationally,” Cruz
said. “From what I saw, I came to suspect HSBC had become the Mexican drug
cartels’ bank of choice.
To implement the money-laundering scheme, the 1,000 pages of
customer account records suggest HSBC relies on identity theft to capture
legitimate Social Security numbers used to create the bogus retail and
commercial bank accounts through which HSBC employees are depositing and
withdrawing hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis, apparently
without the knowledge of the identity-theft victims.
“I’ve never heard back from the two Department of Homeland
Securities investigators that did the telephone interviews with me on Feb. 7,
2012, even though both said they would ‘get back to me,’” Cruz said.
“The New York District Attorney that I originally approached
has never followed up with me, even after admitting, ‘This is money
laundering,’” Cruz continued, after providing WND with documentation showing he
had contacted Assistant District Attorney Jeremy Schelleppe and Investigator
Patrick Mulcahey of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office in 2012.
“The HSBC fraud investigator at the bank told me the bank
had $2 billion set aside to pay the fines, and conveniently HSBC got away with
paying something like $1.9 billion in total fines and penalties,” he said.
Cruz ultimately was fired after his supervisors made
numerous attempts to discourage him from pursuing what turned out to be his
personal investigation into HSBC illegal money-laundering activity.
“When I began bringing to the attention of my supervisors
suspicious activity in accounts that needed to be reported to legal
authorities, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, I was told to
shut up,” Cruz said.
His job required Cruz to access the HSBC computer system to
find accounts to contact and visit in person.
“I was shocked to find accounts through which millions of
dollars were being deposited and withdrawn without any apparent business
activity being conducted,” he said. “Then when I went to visit the business, I
found nothing – shell companies, vacant offices with no furniture, or no such
business whatsoever at the address listed on the account records.”
Cruz never imagined that holding his job at HSBC would mean
turning a blind eye to criminal behavior.
“I always thought that if you ran a bank, you would keep
away from customers with fake names,” he continued. “Instead, what I found at
HSBC were thousands of accounts established for phantom businesses that had
apparently only thousands of dollars of claimed business each year, but
millions of dollars flowing into and out of the accounts every month.”
When Cruz attempted to hand his information over to Sen.
Carl Levin, D-Mich., then the chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigating
Committee looking into HSBC money-laundering activities, he was told to fill
out a form, which he did, only to receive no response whatsoever.
“WND is the first and only news agency to put my story on
the air, to put my story on the Web, to get my story out to people,” Cruz
explained, after providing WND with the letters he had sent to the Wall Street
Journal in 2012. Cruz tried to provide the newspaper with the HSBC bank account
internal records he had in his possession that documented his allegations HSBC
management and senior employees in New York and Long Island were involved in a
massive money-laundering scheme.
A close reading of the 330-page report Levin’s Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations issued on July 17, 2012, titled “U.S.
Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case
History,” places the blame not on HSBC employees in New York, but upon the bank
holding company’s carelessness with acquiring suspect subsidiary banks in
Mexico and allowing the Mexican subsidiary to deal with suspect accounts that
had alleged ties to Mexican drug cartels.
On page 3 of that report, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations attributed the HSBC money-laundering criminal activities to a
“weak AML [Anti-Money Laundering] program,” carefully avoiding any allegations
that specific HSBC employees in the U.S. or Mexico were criminally liable for
their involvement in what the federal government documented was hundreds of
billions of dollars in Mexican drug-cartel money tracing back to the year 2000.
Source:http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/whistleblower-ag-nominee-in-1-billion-obama-cover-up/
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