The leaked documents come from FinCEN, which falls under the US Treasury Department and deals with international financial crime. More than four hundred independent journalists from more than eighty countries worked on their analysis. The British BBC likened the meaning of “FinCen Files” to the so-called Panama Documents, a 2016 scandal involving the Panamanian company Mossack Fonseca, during which the secret accounts of well-known businessmen and politicians in tax havens were revealed.
The US government considers the contents of the files from FinCEN to be top secret and the office has already published them on its website warningthat “unauthorized disclosure is a criminal offense that may affect the national security of the United States.”
Specifically, these are 2,500 bank reports sent between 2000 and 2017 to the US authorities. Investigative reporters found a total of 2,121 suspicious banking transactions worth a total of two trillion dollars, ie over 45.7 trillion crowns. And some of the findings are really shocking.
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For example, until recently, Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, was supposed to allow fraudsters to send stolen money in the millions of dollars around the world, even after being alerted to suspicious activities by US authorities. The largest US bank JPMorgan Chase allegedly allowed a company to transfer more than a billion dollars through a bank account in London, without knowing who owns the company. A later investigation found that the company belonged to a man on the FBI’s list of the ten most wanted criminals in the world.
The list of scandalous deeds does not end there. Deutsche Bank Germany has long ignored that its services are used for money laundering by members of organized crime, terrorist groups and drug traffickers. The Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates should have erred in the case of a local company that helped Iranian entities avoid US sanctions.
One of the revelations concerns Arkady Rotenberg, a Russian businessman who is one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest friends and who has been blacklisted by the US and the EU since 2014 due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. According to secret documents from FinCEN, the British bank Barclays managed accounts belonging to companies with demonstrable ties to Arkady Rotenberg and his brother Boris until 2017. Barclays made £ 60 million transactions through these accounts, even at a time when Arkady and Boris Rotenberg were already on Western sanctions.
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Other prominent names that have appeared in the leaked files include Russian oligarch Oleg Deripask, former Trump’s presidential campaign manager and convicted impostor Paul Manafort, and Africa’s richest woman, Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos.
Representatives of the accused banks usually refuse to comment on the scandal or deny and trivialize their guilt. “This is not new information. We acknowledged that our control system had weaknesses in the past, apologized for them, and paid appropriate fines. And most importantly, we learned from our mistakes, “Deutsche Bank told the American news server BuzzFeed News.
“Due to the confidential nature of these documents, we will not confirm or comment on any particular report or transaction,” Citibank of New York said.
The value of their shares fell sharply to all large banks in response to these findings during Monday. Deutsche Bank recorded a decline of 7.7 percent, the price of shares in JP Morgan fell by 4.38 percent. Barclays fell 5.42 percent. HSBC’s emissions have even hit the lowest level in the last quarter century on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
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The documents also contained 250 transactions to be conducted through the Czechia. Suspicious money was received or paid by Československá obchodní banka, Česká spořitelna or PPF Banka. However, even Czech financial institutions did not want to comment much on the situation.
“Due to the legal obligation of confidentiality, ČSOB is not in a position to share information about individual clients, transactions or links to responsible authorities,” Michaela Průchová from ČSOB’s External Communications Department told E15. “In line with European law, we support the authorities’ efforts to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and financial crime,” the spokeswoman added.
According to Filip Hrubý from Česká spořitelna, the very fact that the leaked information comes exclusively from the US Office for the Prevention of Financial Crime is proof that “the system of international supervision over suspicious transactions, in which Czech banks also participate, works”.
Banks and doubtful transactionsName list of the largest banking institutions with the total amount of suspicious transactions according to FinCEN Files (in dollars):
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