What happened and why Here's one for your next trip to the bank branch... Leaked documents - to Buzzfeed and then the journalistic magic circle - revealed $2tn of transactions made by fraudsters, drug cartels, traffickers, and plenty of oligarchs, that have rattled around the world's biggest bank for years. But first... 🔎 An A-Z on the anagrams you need-to-know... FinCEN - the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The people at the US Treasury who combat financial crime.ICIJ - the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The creme de la creme of investigative journalists, made up of 100+ news organisations from around the world. Rule No.1... If you are planning to profit as a criminal (and I really hope you're not), money laundering is your entry-level must-have. In short, that's taking dirty money from crime and shifting it into a well-respected bank account. Banks, as you'd expect, are supposed to avoid this happening. But money talks. And so did the FinCEN files.... HSBC (-6.48%)... enabled fraudsters to shift millions of dollars of stolen money around the world.JP Morgan (-5.76%)... saw $1bn move through an account under its nose without knowing who owned it (shotgun?).Barclays (-5.16%).. A close pal of Vladimir Putin used a Barclays bank to avoid sanctions and snapped up some art in the process. 🇬🇧 U-Kidding me... Most telling was just how dirty the UK has proven to be when it comes to private banking. Over 3,000 UK companies landed in the FinCEN files, more than any other country. It included numerous oligarchs avoiding sanctions, making dodgy payments, and also revealed how Chelsea football club owner, Roman Abramovich once held secret investments in footballers through an offshore company... which is just weird. | The Takeaway Why this one matters... We had the Paradise Papers (2017), the Panama Papers (2016) and a Swiss leaks before, but these were relatively isolated to one of two companies. FinCEN is different, because it is most major banks under the sun and potentially a huge dent in the long-winding reputation recovery of banks.
