Current Events > Justice department won't prosecute Citi's Mexican money laundering

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whitewimmin
05/25/17 8:30:18 AM
#1:


https://thinkprogress.org/jeff-sessions-soft-on-banks-tough-on-minor-offenses-7380295efc0
The government has agreed not to prosecute Citigroup’s Mexico-based subsidiary despite damning evidence it aided a cross-border money-laundering scheme for years, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. The non-prosecution agreement is in sharp contrast with the hard line that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has already laid out for blue-collar criminals.

Under the non-prosecution agreement, Citigroup-owned Banamex USA will pay $97.4 million and admit it broke the Bank Secrecy Act for years.

Banamex and Citi officials knew of some 18,000 separate suspicious account activities from 2007 to 2012 yet reported just six to regulators, according to the description of the crimes in the deal. The transactions mostly involved remittance payments from people in the United States to account holders in Mexico — a standard class of transaction relied upon heavily by immigrants.

The transactions Citigroup failed to police internally or report to external authorities, however, were not typical worker remittances. Those usually involve small sums and scattered movements of money — as one would expect to see when a large group of individual workers are sending some of their pay back home to a large number of families.

Citigroup’s subsidiary noticed that very large remittances were flowing into the same bank account — as one might expect to see if illicit, scattered profits earned in the United States were being consolidated across the border by the person or organization who had made them possible.

Bankers were well aware of more than a billion dollars in suspicious remittances but did almost nothing to draw law enforcement attention to the transactions, on which the bank itself was of course earning profit.

Citigroup, which took control of Banamex some years prior to the bank’s criminal failings on money laundering oversight, plans to close the subsidiary down for good later this summer. But Citi itself was not required to plead guilty to a crime.

Corporate crime enforcement watchdogs immediately hammered the Trump administration.
“Again, a crime and no crooks,” Bart Naylor of Public Citizen told the Corporate Crime Reporter. The deal sparks fears of “a kid-gloves approach towards corporate crime in the new administration,” Too Big To Jail author Brandon Garrett told the paper. Roughly eight times out of nine that the government builds up a Bank Secrecy Act case, Garrett said, it chooses to resolve it through sterner means than the non-prosecution deal Citigroup struck this week.

A sweetheart deal for a megabank is hardly new. The Obama administration was notoriously soft on white-collar crime for the first three-quarters of its tenure, before making some high-profile but low-impact pushes to hold banking companies publicly accountable. Overall enforcement of white-collar criminal law has been on a downward trend for decades.

But this is the second time in as many years that Citigroup has acknowledged involvement in criminal activity. In the previous example, it had no subsidiary onto which it could dump blame. It pleaded guilty in 2015, along with several other banking giants, to rigging markets for foreign currencies.

Such repeat offending would be grounds for severe punishment enhancements in other criminal contexts, under Sessions’ own recent policy directive instructing federal prosecutors to seek the maximum possible prison terms even in low-level drug crime cases.

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Irony
05/25/17 8:31:21 AM
#2:


So they took a bribe?
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