*ABL, UBL, HabibMetro, Bank Alfalah, SCB, and HBL carried out 29 suspicioustransactions north of USD 2 million*
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published aninvestigation into the role of global banks in industrial-scale moneylaundering and its catastrophic consequences, from all over the world.
Titled as FinCEN Files, the report reveals that global banks moved morethan $2 trillion between 1999 and 2017 in payments they believed weresuspicious, and flagged bank clients in more than 170 countries who wereidentified as being involved in potentially illicit transactions. Thefigures include $514 billion at JPMorgan Chase and $1.3 trillion atDeutsche Bank.
The recently uncovered trove of government documents also revealed 29transactions that showed suspicious transactions to and from Pakistan.$1,942,560 was received as a result of these transactions that included one‘sent’ transactions worth $452,000. These transactions were from AlliedBank Limited (ABL), United Bank Limited (UBL), Habib Metropolitan Bank Ltd,Bank Alfalah, Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), and Habib Bank Limited (HBL).
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“Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it toflourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitatingcriminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives fromcriminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives thema free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees” Buzzfeed Newswrote in its coverage of the investigative reportlink.
The story is titled after ‘The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, orFinCEN’, which is the agency within the Treasury Department charged withcombating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financialcrimes. It collects millions of these suspicious activity reports, known asSARs. It makes them available to US law enforcement agencies and othernations’ financial intelligence operations.
