The headline of a Nov. 5 business column in the Los Angeles Times by business columnist Michael Hiltzik asks the right question: “A Huge Bank Pleaded Guilty To Conspiring To Launder Money, So Why Weren’t Top Executives Charged?”
TD Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank, is a subsidiary of Canada’s TD Bank Group (Toronto-Dominion Bank), and the 10th largest U.S. commercial bank with 1,100 branches on the East Coast from Maine to Florida. It facilitated laundering more than a half-billion dollars by human traffickers, fentanyl dealers, a major Ponzi schemer, among others. Yet it failed to file legally mandated reports of suspicious transactions (SARs) even though one of the launderers had deposited and withdrawn “more than $1 million in cash in a single day.”
The U.S. JusticeDepartment and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), announced on Oct. 10 that TD Bank will pay $3 billion in penalties and a guilty plea to a count of “conspiring” to violate anti-money laundering laws. The settlement, which allows bankers to not go to jail and maintains their banking license to operate, notes sourly that the bank’s cooperation with authorities was “limited.” Besides its CEO, who is to step down in April, no one from the 14 member management will resign.
Noting that the bank’s slogan is “America’s Most Convenient Bank,” Attorney General Merrick Garland stated on Oct. 10, “There is something terribly wrong with a bank that knowingly makes its services convenient for criminals.” In an Oct. 30 letter to Garland, Sen. Elizabeth Warren , a member of the Senate Banking Committee, asserted that the deal allows “this lawbreaking bank and its reckless leadership to escape the full scope of penalties ... necessary to effectively deter future criminal acts.” The Justice Department also charged the bank with “conspiring ... to launder” money rather than charging it with money laundering itself, Warren observed—a distinction that frees the bank from a federal law that might have resulted in the loss of its banking license in the U.S.
Last year, the bank agreed to pay $1.2 billion to settle a lawsuit accusing it of involvement in a $7 billion Ponzi scheme orchestrated by con man Allen Stanford, who is now in prison. The money is earmarked to compensate victims; the bank didn’t admit liability and asserted that it merely provided Stanford’s company with conventional banking services.
Paying fines or a civil settlement has become a common practice for dope and terror money laundering banks in the U.S. After Wachovia in 2010 and HSBC in 2012, all other banks identified by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2019 in the “FinCEN-files” bought their way out in that way: JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, New York Mellon, HSBC and Deutsche Bank. The dope must go on!
