Wachovia Admits It Laundered Millions in Mexican Drug Cash
Information Liberation
Wachovia bank executives have admitted that the banking giant laundered millions of dollars for Mexican drug lords between 2003 and 2008, prosecutors announced in Miami this afternoon.
The bank has promised to pay $160 million in fines and penalties and to set up new safeguards within a year to prevent drug money from coming through the bank.
If it fails in that effort, Wachovia could face criminal charges, says Jeffrey Sloman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.
"Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations," Sloman said at a meeting in downtown Miami. "[They] laundered at least $110 million in drug proceeds."
The feds built a case against Wachovia around the bank's relationship with Mexican exchange banks called CDCs (or casas de cambio).
Wachovia execs knew as early as 1996 that the Mexican CDCs were hot spots for drug money but kept doing business with them anyway, Sloman says.
The American bank routed billions of dollars in the past ten years through the CDCs without any effective oversight into where the cash was coming from.
Prosecutors were able to trace some of that money to the purchase of several airplanes used in drug runs, which led to more than 20,000 kilos of cocaine being seized by investigators.
Under an agreement signed by federal Judge Joan Leonard this afternoon, Wachovia will forfeit $110 million in illegal proceeds from drug sales and pay an additional $50 million fine.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
FDIC Hits Record "Default" Level As Deposit Insurance Fund Plunges By $12.7 Billion To NEGATIVE 20.9 Billion
Zero Hedge
"The U.S. banking industry continued to struggle in the fourth quarter, as the number of banks on the brink of failure continued
Zero Hedge
"The U.S. banking industry continued to struggle in the fourth quarter, as the number of banks on the brink of failure continued
to rise and the government's fund to protect deposits fell sharply into the red.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Tuesday that its deposit-insurance fund fell to $20.9 billion at the end of 2009, a $12.6 billion drop in the final three months of the year, as bank failures continued at a pace not seen since the savings and loan crisis. The fund's reserve ratio was -0.39% at the end of the quarter, the lowest on record for the combined bank and thrift fund"
Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs
Bloomberg
"Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a coverup. Geithner countered that he had acted properly to avert the collapse of the financial system.
A potentially more important development slipped by with less notice, Bloomberg Markets reports in its April issue. Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, placed into the hearing record a five-page document itemizing the mortgage securities on which banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA had bought $62.1 billion in credit-default swaps from AIG.
These were the deals that pushed the insurer to the brink of insolvency -- and were eventually paid in full at taxpayer expense. The New York Fed, which secretly engineered the bailout, prevented the full publication of the document for more than a year, even when AIG wanted it released.
That lack of disclosure shows how the government has obstructed a proper accounting of what went wrong in the financial crisis, author and former investment banker William Cohan says. 'This secrecy is one more example of how the whole bailout has been done in such a slithering manner,' says Cohan, who wrote “House of Cards” (Doubleday, 2009), about the unraveling of Bear Stearns Cos. 'There’s been no accountability.'
The public can now see for the first time how poorly the securities performed, with losses exceeding 75 percent of their notional value in some cases. Compounding this, the document and Bloomberg data demonstrate that the banks that bought the swaps from AIG are mostly the same firms that underwrote the CDOs in the first place. "
Bloomberg
"Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a coverup. Geithner countered that he had acted properly to avert the collapse of the financial system.
A potentially more important development slipped by with less notice, Bloomberg Markets reports in its April issue. Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, placed into the hearing record a five-page document itemizing the mortgage securities on which banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA had bought $62.1 billion in credit-default swaps from AIG.
These were the deals that pushed the insurer to the brink of insolvency -- and were eventually paid in full at taxpayer expense. The New York Fed, which secretly engineered the bailout, prevented the full publication of the document for more than a year, even when AIG wanted it released.
That lack of disclosure shows how the government has obstructed a proper accounting of what went wrong in the financial crisis, author and former investment banker William Cohan says. 'This secrecy is one more example of how the whole bailout has been done in such a slithering manner,' says Cohan, who wrote “House of Cards” (Doubleday, 2009), about the unraveling of Bear Stearns Cos. 'There’s been no accountability.'
The public can now see for the first time how poorly the securities performed, with losses exceeding 75 percent of their notional value in some cases. Compounding this, the document and Bloomberg data demonstrate that the banks that bought the swaps from AIG are mostly the same firms that underwrote the CDOs in the first place. "
Corporate Crime Data
Gary Null
"Our data collection has found that over the past 30 years, over $430 billion has been paid to parties by Wall Street firms in over 1500 cases.
Gary Null
"Our data collection has found that over the past 30 years, over $430 billion has been paid to parties by Wall Street firms in over 1500 cases.
Some data highlights:
- Bank of America has spent $14.9 billion to settle 15 cases alleging various charges such as securities violations and mismanagement;
- Citigroup has spent over $13.9 billion to settle 12 cases alleging various charges including abusive lending practices and involvement in fraudulent activities;
- Merrill Lynch has spent $12.2 billion to settle cases involving various allegations including negligence and mismanagement of funds;
- Morgan Stanley has spent over $5 billion to settle 11 cases involving various allegation including failure to disclose material information to customers;
- Wachovia has spent over $9.5 billion to resolve allegations including misleading investors and conflicts of interest;
- UBS has spent $19.5 billion to settle 6 cases with various charges including misleading investors."
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