PRESS RELEASE
Impact of Congressional HSBC Exposure: Senior Bankers Charged
July 20, 2016 (EIRNS)—The three major exposures of British/Saudi attacks on the United States just released—the Chilcot Report, "28 Pages" of the Congressional 9/11 Report, and House Financial Services Report on HSBC crimes—are continuing to combine for a major impact on events in the United States.
Among these, the "surprising" arrest and charge today of two relatively senior HSBC bankers. The charges are rigging the values of currencies, as well as improper use of knowledge of foreign-exchange customers’ accounts, "front-running" those accounts.
The Justice Department’s investigation has been going on for four years, and has been in limbo for two! But suddenly on Tuesday, Mark Johnson, HSBC’s global head of foreign exchange cash trading in London, was arrested at JFK Airport in New York as he was about to fly out of the country. He was held in a Brooklyn jail overnight and was to appear in court Wednesday. According to Bloomberg News,
"The U.S. unsealed charges against him and Stuart Scott, the bank’s former head of currency trading in Europe, making them the first individuals to be charged in the long-running probe."
Scott is in the United Kingdom and will need to be extradited.
The investigation was so long-running that "in September 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder said he expected charges against individuals within months."
The House Financial Services Committee’s report on HSBC, released July 8, made clear that British officials and agencies, including Chancellor George Osborne and the Financial Services Agency (FSA), had intervened to protect HSBC from what should have been much more serious criminal charges—money-laundering for drug cartels with terrorist connections, collaborating with a Saudi bank in doing so. The substance had been provided by a Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations report in 2012.
It was this British intervention, the House Committee’s report found, which led Holder to state that HSBC was escaping prosecution because ending the bank’s Western hemisphere operations could trigger a general crash of the banking system.
Now, just 12 days after the release of the report, there are criminal charges, at last, against relatively senior executives of this criminal bank—or any big London or Wall Street bank.
