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Showing posts with label HSBC Bank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HSBC Bank. Show all posts
Friday, September 20, 2013
Monday, December 24, 2012
HSBC SCAM : PC: I-T probing HSBC’s list of foreign accounts
New Delhi: Finance minister P Chidambaram on Monday said the income tax department was probing the HSBC list of accounts held by Indians abroad, while securing the passage of the Prevention of Money Laundering Bill in Rajya Sabha.
“HSBC list of accounts is being investigated by the income tax and other departments,” Chidambaram said in his reply to the discussion on the money laundering bill.
The case of money laundering, he explained, would arise only if there was a predicate offence and the proceeds of that were used for money laundering purposes.
The Prevention of Money Laundering (Amendment) Bill was passed by voice vote. It seeks to widen the definition of money laundering to include concealment, acquisition, possession and use of proceeds of crime as criminal activities. The bill was earlier passed by the Lok Sabha. It provides for removal of the Rs 5 lakh limit for fine laid down in the existing Act.
Chidambaram’s statement that the I-T department was probing the list of nearly 700 foreign accounts held by Indian individuals/entities came a month after Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal accused the government of not acting adequately on a list of HSBC accounts, including those held by top industrialists, shared by the French government in June 2011.
The charges were, however, denied by the industrialists, including Mukesh Ambani who was named by Kejriwal as one of the account holders. A persistent Kejriwal, however, released the HSBC account numbers of Mukesh and Anil Ambani in Mumbai last week.
Meanwhile, ahead of the bill’s passage by the Rajya Sabha on Monday, Chidambaram emphasized that the PMLA had been amended twice earlier in 2005 and 2009, and must now be amended again in line with the international law, India being a member of the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering. Chidambaram said the bill seeks to enlarge definition of definition of predicate offences of money laundering and include activities that are defined as crime under various other laws.
The minister said the amendment would introduce the concept of 'corresponding law' to link the provisions of Indian law with the laws of foreign countries.
It proposes to make provision for attachment and confiscation of the proceeds of crime even if there is no conviction so long as it is proved that offence of money laundering has taken place and property in question is involved in money-laundering. It also provides for appeal against the orders of the Appellate Tribunal directly to the Supreme Court.
Earlier, initiating the debate on the bill, BJP’s Prakash Javadekar expressed contentment at the government’s acceptance of 18 recommendations of the parliamentary standing committee.
Courtesy:
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM/2012/12/18&PageLabel=12&EntityId=Ar01200&ViewMode=HTML
“HSBC list of accounts is being investigated by the income tax and other departments,” Chidambaram said in his reply to the discussion on the money laundering bill.
The case of money laundering, he explained, would arise only if there was a predicate offence and the proceeds of that were used for money laundering purposes.
The Prevention of Money Laundering (Amendment) Bill was passed by voice vote. It seeks to widen the definition of money laundering to include concealment, acquisition, possession and use of proceeds of crime as criminal activities. The bill was earlier passed by the Lok Sabha. It provides for removal of the Rs 5 lakh limit for fine laid down in the existing Act.
Chidambaram’s statement that the I-T department was probing the list of nearly 700 foreign accounts held by Indian individuals/entities came a month after Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal accused the government of not acting adequately on a list of HSBC accounts, including those held by top industrialists, shared by the French government in June 2011.
The charges were, however, denied by the industrialists, including Mukesh Ambani who was named by Kejriwal as one of the account holders. A persistent Kejriwal, however, released the HSBC account numbers of Mukesh and Anil Ambani in Mumbai last week.
Meanwhile, ahead of the bill’s passage by the Rajya Sabha on Monday, Chidambaram emphasized that the PMLA had been amended twice earlier in 2005 and 2009, and must now be amended again in line with the international law, India being a member of the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering. Chidambaram said the bill seeks to enlarge definition of definition of predicate offences of money laundering and include activities that are defined as crime under various other laws.
The minister said the amendment would introduce the concept of 'corresponding law' to link the provisions of Indian law with the laws of foreign countries.
It proposes to make provision for attachment and confiscation of the proceeds of crime even if there is no conviction so long as it is proved that offence of money laundering has taken place and property in question is involved in money-laundering. It also provides for appeal against the orders of the Appellate Tribunal directly to the Supreme Court.
Earlier, initiating the debate on the bill, BJP’s Prakash Javadekar expressed contentment at the government’s acceptance of 18 recommendations of the parliamentary standing committee.
Courtesy:
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM/2012/12/18&PageLabel=12&EntityId=Ar01200&ViewMode=HTML
Sunday, December 16, 2012
HSBC: How Simple Became Complicated, and costly
HSBC-SETTLEMENT-COMPLEX-FINE:HSBC: How Simple Became Complicated, and costly
HSBC takes its name from its roots as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, but there has long been a joke inside and outside the firm that the name stands for "How Simple Became Complicated".
That complexity in part explains how the London-based bank ended up with the biggest fine ever imposed on a financial firm by U.S. regulators on Tuesday - an eye-watering $1.9 billion - after a lengthy U.S. probe showed sweeping problems at the bank. Lax controls had left HSBC as the "preferred financial institution" for drug traffickers and money launderers, U.S. prosecutors said this week.
The concern is that HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, with more than 60 million customers across 84 countries, is unable to adequately monitor all its operations, a task made harder by its history of patchwork acquisitions.
HSBC said it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster compliance and simplify its control structure to address the lapses in anti-money-laundering controls, mainly in its Mexico and U.S. operations, which led to stinging criticism from politicians and the record punishment.
"(Chief Executive) Stuart Gulliver is doing a good job looking after the group, but at the end of the day it is an absolutely massive bank with branches everywhere; it is impossible to guarantee that there isn't something going on somewhere," said Jane Coffey, head of equities at Royal London Asset Management, an HSBC shareholder.
Gulliver restructured HSBC shortly after taking over at the start of 2011, setting up global businesses and functions to improve communication and operations across the group.
In the past, national heads ran all its businesses within each country, which could result in problems going unnoticed. The bank needed to improve its internal sharing of information to help cut down on illicit activity, U.S. Senator Carl Levin said when he published a scathing report on the bank in July.
In Mexico, where HSBC became one of the top banks with the 2002 purchase of Grupo Financiero Bital, a rapid expansion meant problems were missed. Between 2007 and 2008, HSBC's Mexican operations moved $7 billion into the bank's U.S. operations, and both Mexican and U.S. authorities warned the bank the amount of money could only have been so high if it was tied to illegal narcotics proceeds, the U.S. Senate report said.
In early 2008, a Mexican drug lord referred to the bank as the "place to launder money", U.S. prosecutors said this week.
TALL TASK
Unlike the Libor interest-rate rigging scandal that rocked UK rival Barclays this summer and forced its chairman and chief executive to quit, HSBC's fine has not prompted calls for senior management to step down.
Stephen Green, who was chief executive and then chairman from June 2003 until December 2010, is now UK Trade Minister and has faced calls to explain what he knew. He said in July he shared the "regrets" HSBC had about the failings. Michael Geoghegan was CEO from May 2006 until the end of 2010, and has not taken on any major new role.
Critics say the failures highlighted this week show the scale of the task facing Gulliver; he has simultaneously to improve returns for investors, meet tougher global regulations, cut costs and stay on top of potential problems.
For some, it is evidence that banks should be prevented from becoming too big, especially as HSBC didn't live up to earlier promises to change.
Back in 2003 New York regulators cracked the whip on HSBC Bank USA, ordering it to do a better job of policing itself for suspicious money flows.
The bank promptly hired a tough federal prosecutor to oversee anti-money-laundering efforts and installed monitoring systems for operations that had grown unwieldy during its big U.S. expansion. But in confidential documents that originate from investigations of HSBC's U.S. operations by two U.S. attorneys' offices there are allegations that from 2005 HSBC was not adequately reviewing hundreds of billions in transactions.
When the Senate issued its 400-plus-page report about how HSBC's lax controls had left it as a financier to clients in areas tied to drug cartels, terrorist funding and tax cheats, it accused the bank of having a "pervasively polluted" culture for a long time.
Gulliver said in a statement after Tuesday's fine: "The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organisation from the one that made those mistakes."
Cormac Leech, banks analyst for Liberum Capital, said he thought HSBC had done enough to assure investors that it had dealt with its regulatory issues, pointing to its commitments to spend more on processes and better monitoring initiatives.
Compliance costs in North America increased by about $200 million in the first nine months of this year, and a review of customer files will cost about $700 million in the next five years. Gulliver has recruited senior former U.S. compliance experts to lead its efforts.
His attempts to streamline the bank and improve compliance is part of a wider three-year turnaround effort that has seen him sell dozens of businesses and target $3.5 billion in annual cost cuts. He is coming to the end of the second year.
"More could be done (to speed up change), but I think a lot has been done. HSBC was probably more at the incompetent rather than immoral end of the spectrum," said one of the bank's biggest 25 investors, who asked not to be named.
"It's like changing the civil service, changing HSBC. It's such a large organisation. I think there will be large parts of the group which are quite resistant," he said.
HSBC remains, however, a strong favourite with analysts. Of 33 covering the stock, 22 rate it a "buy", eight have a "hold" rating and just three consider it a "sell", according to Reuters data.
"I think a private client can be reasonably confident that the HSBC dividend is sustainable, that they have good management in place and that the bank is not unduly exposed to high-risk areas," said Algernon Percy, head of private clients and manager of the JO Hambro Investment Management Portfolio Fund and an HSBC shareholder.
Courtesy:
© Thomson Reuters 2012
Reuters / London Dec 12, 2012, 18:43 IST
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/hsbc-how-simple-became-complicatedcostly/199288/on
HSBC takes its name from its roots as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, but there has long been a joke inside and outside the firm that the name stands for "How Simple Became Complicated".
That complexity in part explains how the London-based bank ended up with the biggest fine ever imposed on a financial firm by U.S. regulators on Tuesday - an eye-watering $1.9 billion - after a lengthy U.S. probe showed sweeping problems at the bank. Lax controls had left HSBC as the "preferred financial institution" for drug traffickers and money launderers, U.S. prosecutors said this week.
The concern is that HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, with more than 60 million customers across 84 countries, is unable to adequately monitor all its operations, a task made harder by its history of patchwork acquisitions.
HSBC said it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster compliance and simplify its control structure to address the lapses in anti-money-laundering controls, mainly in its Mexico and U.S. operations, which led to stinging criticism from politicians and the record punishment.
"(Chief Executive) Stuart Gulliver is doing a good job looking after the group, but at the end of the day it is an absolutely massive bank with branches everywhere; it is impossible to guarantee that there isn't something going on somewhere," said Jane Coffey, head of equities at Royal London Asset Management, an HSBC shareholder.
Gulliver restructured HSBC shortly after taking over at the start of 2011, setting up global businesses and functions to improve communication and operations across the group.
In the past, national heads ran all its businesses within each country, which could result in problems going unnoticed. The bank needed to improve its internal sharing of information to help cut down on illicit activity, U.S. Senator Carl Levin said when he published a scathing report on the bank in July.
In Mexico, where HSBC became one of the top banks with the 2002 purchase of Grupo Financiero Bital, a rapid expansion meant problems were missed. Between 2007 and 2008, HSBC's Mexican operations moved $7 billion into the bank's U.S. operations, and both Mexican and U.S. authorities warned the bank the amount of money could only have been so high if it was tied to illegal narcotics proceeds, the U.S. Senate report said.
In early 2008, a Mexican drug lord referred to the bank as the "place to launder money", U.S. prosecutors said this week.
TALL TASK
Unlike the Libor interest-rate rigging scandal that rocked UK rival Barclays this summer and forced its chairman and chief executive to quit, HSBC's fine has not prompted calls for senior management to step down.
Stephen Green, who was chief executive and then chairman from June 2003 until December 2010, is now UK Trade Minister and has faced calls to explain what he knew. He said in July he shared the "regrets" HSBC had about the failings. Michael Geoghegan was CEO from May 2006 until the end of 2010, and has not taken on any major new role.
Critics say the failures highlighted this week show the scale of the task facing Gulliver; he has simultaneously to improve returns for investors, meet tougher global regulations, cut costs and stay on top of potential problems.
For some, it is evidence that banks should be prevented from becoming too big, especially as HSBC didn't live up to earlier promises to change.
Back in 2003 New York regulators cracked the whip on HSBC Bank USA, ordering it to do a better job of policing itself for suspicious money flows.
The bank promptly hired a tough federal prosecutor to oversee anti-money-laundering efforts and installed monitoring systems for operations that had grown unwieldy during its big U.S. expansion. But in confidential documents that originate from investigations of HSBC's U.S. operations by two U.S. attorneys' offices there are allegations that from 2005 HSBC was not adequately reviewing hundreds of billions in transactions.
When the Senate issued its 400-plus-page report about how HSBC's lax controls had left it as a financier to clients in areas tied to drug cartels, terrorist funding and tax cheats, it accused the bank of having a "pervasively polluted" culture for a long time.
Gulliver said in a statement after Tuesday's fine: "The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organisation from the one that made those mistakes."
Cormac Leech, banks analyst for Liberum Capital, said he thought HSBC had done enough to assure investors that it had dealt with its regulatory issues, pointing to its commitments to spend more on processes and better monitoring initiatives.
Compliance costs in North America increased by about $200 million in the first nine months of this year, and a review of customer files will cost about $700 million in the next five years. Gulliver has recruited senior former U.S. compliance experts to lead its efforts.
His attempts to streamline the bank and improve compliance is part of a wider three-year turnaround effort that has seen him sell dozens of businesses and target $3.5 billion in annual cost cuts. He is coming to the end of the second year.
"More could be done (to speed up change), but I think a lot has been done. HSBC was probably more at the incompetent rather than immoral end of the spectrum," said one of the bank's biggest 25 investors, who asked not to be named.
"It's like changing the civil service, changing HSBC. It's such a large organisation. I think there will be large parts of the group which are quite resistant," he said.
HSBC remains, however, a strong favourite with analysts. Of 33 covering the stock, 22 rate it a "buy", eight have a "hold" rating and just three consider it a "sell", according to Reuters data.
"I think a private client can be reasonably confident that the HSBC dividend is sustainable, that they have good management in place and that the bank is not unduly exposed to high-risk areas," said Algernon Percy, head of private clients and manager of the JO Hambro Investment Management Portfolio Fund and an HSBC shareholder.
Courtesy:
© Thomson Reuters 2012
Reuters / London Dec 12, 2012, 18:43 IST
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/hsbc-how-simple-became-complicatedcostly/199288/on
Kejriwal reads out ‘Swiss bank account numbers’ of Ambanis
Mumbai: Ignoring denials issued previously by the Ambanis, Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday reiterated allegations that they held secret Swiss bank accounts and revealed their alleged account numbers.
“A few days ago, I exposed that Anil and Mukesh Ambani have Swiss bank accounts. They have not admitted their fraud. I have the Swiss bank account numbers of Anil and Mukesh Ambani here with me. Shall I read them?” Kejriwal asked a packed hall at the Times of India Literary Carnival on Sunday. “5090160983 and 5090160984, HSBC Bank,” he said.
Reacting to Kejriwal’s latest salvo, a spokesperson for Anil Ambani rejected the allegations. “Mr Anil D Ambani had no bank account with HSBC in Geneva. It is regrettable that such baseless allegations are being made at the behest of vested interests,” the spokesperson said.
Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) also rejected the allegations and reiterated its November statement.
Black money: I-T dept not acting against rich, alleges Kejriwal
Mumbai: Reacting to Arvind Kejriwal’s fresh allegations on Sunday, an RIL spokesperson said, “We had already issued a statement on November 9, 2012 that categorically stated that neither Reliance Industries Limited nor Mr Mukesh Ambani have or had any illegitimate accounts anywhere in the world.”
Last month, Kejriwal had alleged that the Ambani brothers had Rs 100 crore each in Swiss bank accounts while their mother Kokilaben also had a Swiss bank account which had no balance.
Kejriwal and his colleague Prashant Bhushan had also accused multinational bank HSBC of running a huge hawala operation to launder thousands of crores of illicit money belonging to leading industrialists such as the Ambanis, the Burmans of Dabur, Naresh Goyal of Jet Airways, Yashovardhan Birla and Congress MP Annu Tandon. All of them had denied the allegations.
Kejriwal said the income tax department had received the Swiss bank details in 2011 but had chosen not to act against the big fish on the list. “The papers are with the I-T department,” he said. “They (the Ambanis) could have been prosecuted but nothing has been done,” he said.
Earlier, Kejriwal had demanded that the government should reveal the names and amounts of all 700 on the list and explain why it has adopted a different method of investigation against high-income individuals while conducting raids on smaller businessmen.
He had said the government’s statement released a day after he made his allegation in November had proved that the list was authentic and that the tax department had decided to proceed selectively on the list handed over by France.
Citing the example of the US and the UK governments, Kejriwal had questioned the government's reluctance to demand information related to Indians who held secret accounts in foreign banks.
While Kejriwal had made the allegations against HSBC and top Indian businessmen at a news conference last month, this time he chose to make his revelations at a gathering of common citizens at the Times Literary Carnival, who roared and whistled their approval and practically drowned out the numbers which the activist-turned-politician read out.
He has made a string of allegations against politicians, political parties and businessmen in the run-up to the launch of his political party, Aam Admi Party, hoping to cash in on the anti-corruption sentiment in the country.
Courtesy:
Shalini Umachandran TNN
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM/2012/12/10&PageLabel=3&EntityId=Ar00303&ViewMode=HTML
“A few days ago, I exposed that Anil and Mukesh Ambani have Swiss bank accounts. They have not admitted their fraud. I have the Swiss bank account numbers of Anil and Mukesh Ambani here with me. Shall I read them?” Kejriwal asked a packed hall at the Times of India Literary Carnival on Sunday. “5090160983 and 5090160984, HSBC Bank,” he said.
Reacting to Kejriwal’s latest salvo, a spokesperson for Anil Ambani rejected the allegations. “Mr Anil D Ambani had no bank account with HSBC in Geneva. It is regrettable that such baseless allegations are being made at the behest of vested interests,” the spokesperson said.
Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) also rejected the allegations and reiterated its November statement.
Black money: I-T dept not acting against rich, alleges Kejriwal
Mumbai: Reacting to Arvind Kejriwal’s fresh allegations on Sunday, an RIL spokesperson said, “We had already issued a statement on November 9, 2012 that categorically stated that neither Reliance Industries Limited nor Mr Mukesh Ambani have or had any illegitimate accounts anywhere in the world.”
Last month, Kejriwal had alleged that the Ambani brothers had Rs 100 crore each in Swiss bank accounts while their mother Kokilaben also had a Swiss bank account which had no balance.
Kejriwal and his colleague Prashant Bhushan had also accused multinational bank HSBC of running a huge hawala operation to launder thousands of crores of illicit money belonging to leading industrialists such as the Ambanis, the Burmans of Dabur, Naresh Goyal of Jet Airways, Yashovardhan Birla and Congress MP Annu Tandon. All of them had denied the allegations.
Kejriwal said the income tax department had received the Swiss bank details in 2011 but had chosen not to act against the big fish on the list. “The papers are with the I-T department,” he said. “They (the Ambanis) could have been prosecuted but nothing has been done,” he said.
Earlier, Kejriwal had demanded that the government should reveal the names and amounts of all 700 on the list and explain why it has adopted a different method of investigation against high-income individuals while conducting raids on smaller businessmen.
He had said the government’s statement released a day after he made his allegation in November had proved that the list was authentic and that the tax department had decided to proceed selectively on the list handed over by France.
Citing the example of the US and the UK governments, Kejriwal had questioned the government's reluctance to demand information related to Indians who held secret accounts in foreign banks.
While Kejriwal had made the allegations against HSBC and top Indian businessmen at a news conference last month, this time he chose to make his revelations at a gathering of common citizens at the Times Literary Carnival, who roared and whistled their approval and practically drowned out the numbers which the activist-turned-politician read out.
He has made a string of allegations against politicians, political parties and businessmen in the run-up to the launch of his political party, Aam Admi Party, hoping to cash in on the anti-corruption sentiment in the country.
Courtesy:
Shalini Umachandran TNN
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM/2012/12/10&PageLabel=3&EntityId=Ar00303&ViewMode=HTML
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