HOME SECRETARY Amber Rudd has warned that billions of pounds have been laundered through the City of London. She has plans for a new national economic crime centre, with the power to task the Serious Fraud Office to investigate the worst cases of fraud, money laundering and corruption.
The move is part of a revised anti-corruption strategy that targets ‘corrupt insiders’ in sectors including policing, prisons and border force, and pledges greater transparency over who owns and controls businesses to improve trust in Britain as a place to do business.
Rudd’s plan is in fact far too little too late! The foxes have run amok in the hen house for decades. The working class equates banking with robbery, after it had to endure generations of austerity to wipe out the debts of the bankers from the 2008 crash onwards.
On the same day that Rudd made her announcement, it was also announced that the HSBC bank no longer faces the threat of prosecution in the US over allegations of money laundering billions in drug money.
HSBC had signed a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) – a form of probation – with the US Department of Justice in 2012 to avoid facing criminal charges for allegedly laundering hundreds of millions for Mexican drug barons, and acting as a conduit for ‘drug kingpins and rogue nations’.
HSBC says the DPA has now expired and the bank has paid US authorities a record $1.9bn (£1.42bn) settlement. All is now well, or is it? In mid-November it was announced that HSBC had agreed to pay £266m to French authorities to settle a long-running investigation into tax evasion by French clients.
The settlement between HSBC’s Swiss Private Bank and the French prosecutor, was the first such deal to be struck under new French rules introduced in 2016 to allow companies to settle without any finding of guilt.
Also in November 2017 Lord Peter Hain told Parliament he had asked the Treasury to refer an unnamed UK bank, that turned out to be HSBC, for investigation into possible involvement in money laundering on behalf of the Gupta family and South Africa’s President Zuma!
In a letter, seen by the BBC, he named HSBC and said it ignored a warning about large transfers of cash. The Guptas are alleged to have bought influence in government in order to loot state enterprises. Hain called for UK authorities to examine the role of British banks in the scandal!
The world banking system is criminal. It won’t reform. It doesn’t need a slap on the wrist and then rescue when it collapses, with working class living standards paying the price – it needs expropriation.
In fact the 2008 banking collapse is due to be replicated but on an even greater scale after trillions of additional debt, quantitative easing money, has been piled up worldwide. In line with this vast debt, there is now a new ‘imaginary would-be currency’ – the Bitcoin, a symbol on a computer screen masquerading as money.
This digital currency launched on the CBOE Futures Exchange in Chicago at 23:00 GMT Sunday, allowing investors to gamble on whether Bitcoin prices will rise or fall. That casino move is expected to be followed next week by a listing on the rival Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Investors can now gamble on Bitcoin rising or falling in price without actually owning them. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz has accused their innovation of having no intrinsic value beyond supporting money laundering and tax avoidance. The big banks will be pleased!
It may become just what the bankers have ordered – just before the bubble of debt and fictitious value explodes, and a new massive crash takes place, for which the working class will be required to pay the full price!
This capitalist crisis demands that the working class carry out its historic duty. As the grave digger of capitalism, it must continue and conclude the world socialist revolution that was begun in Russia in 1917, and bury capitalism and its banks to build a socialist society worldwide!
