[lmm]

The clients they transferred it for turned out to be murderous drug cartels. But as far as I can see HSBC actually followed all the rules at the time; much has been made of the fact that they lowered the level of controls applied to those transfers for commercial reasons, but the law required them to judge the appropriate level within a particular range, and the level they applied afterwards was still within the legal range for Mexico. Yet whenever they come up on HN you'll hear people talking like they were killing people.

(They reached a settlement where they paid money and made an apology statement rather than going to court, as would most entities in their position).

[mthoms]

That interpretation directly contradicts Mexican authorities:

> the National Banking and Securities Commission (Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores – CNBV) which, across more than 20 volumes and some 10,000 pages, established how HSBC Mexico’s top management committed serious mistakes, such as:

> - Deliberately failing to report suspicious transactions.

> - Permitting the exponential growth of bulk dollar shipments on armored trucks bound for the US.

> - Deliberately delaying the issuance of client reports with unusual and suspicious transactions.

> - Maintaining business relationships, until the last possible moment, with people, businesses and currency exchange houses used by drug traffickers to acquire aircraft.

HSBC may not have been killing people themselves, but they unquestionably facilitated and profited from it. I'm a little surprised that someone would downplay their involvement given its scope TBH.

https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/hsbc-dirty-money-whit...

[lmm]

That's exactly the kind of take I'm talking about. All you've written is phrased to make it sound as negative as possible, but very little sounds like actual illegality. Permitting exponential growth and maintaining business relationships: what business wouldn't want to do that? Deliberately not reporting or delaying reports: sounds bad, but actually these reports are judgement calls, there can be legitimate differences of opinion. The violations of internal policy in your link sound like the same sort of thing: they're written to sound as though closing more suspicious accounts is always good and less is always bad, but actually suspicion is not proof, there can be genuine disagreement, and there's an equal and opposite story about people's accounts being closed for no good reason. 10,000 pages sounds like a lot, but it's to hide the lack of a smoking gun; all there is is a bunch of judgement calls that with the full benefit of hindsight we say were unreasonable because they lead to bad outcomes.

And compare this to Bitcoin where there is no judgement call, no KYC at all, anyone can move money anywhere. I suppose it's harder to gather 10,000 pages about how poor the judgement calls were in hindsight when no-one's making those judgements, but I would hope that HN of all places would look past the sound and fury and pay attention to the actual outcomes.