NEW
YORK – New revelations are emerging that could implicate Loretta Lynch,
President Obama’s attorney general nominee, in the world’s largest
banking scandal.
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.
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.
[...]
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.
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