Thread by @JasonLeopold

💣NEW from our #FinCENFiles: Remember when HSBC paid a $1.9B fine for violating sanctions & allowing drug kingpins to launder $$$ through the bank & then promised to clean up it's act?

Those promises were hollow. Here's the untold backstory w/receipts
buzzfeednews.com/article/anthon…

This was a massive, yearlong investigation into HSBC. We found that after the bank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with DOJ & while it was under the watch of an independent monitor, HSBC continued to facilitate & profit from transactions it suspected were dirty

Our #FinCENFiles shows that Vida Panamá, owned by Panama’s powerful Waked family, used HSBC to exchange $292M in suspicious transactions before Treasury declared it a money laundering organization that washed funds for narco kingpins. (Reps for Waked said the business is legit)

Our investigation uncovered this explosive detail: when HSBC's DPA was nearing its end in 2017, the independent monitor's team wrote to DOJ saying HSBC continued to provide financial services to suspicious people or companies, which could allow alleged criminals to fund terror

When our #FinCENFiles investigation uncovered that HSBC's independent monitor documented in a 1K page report that the bank still a long way to go to stop the flow of dirty money through the bank @BuzzFeedNews & I filed a #FOIA lawsuit against DOJ for the report.

After @BuzzFeedNews and I filed this #FOIA lawsuit for the HSBC monitor's report, DOJ reached out to HSBC about it and then HSBC wrote to DOJ asking the agency not to turn it over to us & mischaracterized a 2nd Circuit decision over a previous attempt to unseal the report

Some EXCLUSIVE news here: Last month, in response to my/@BuzzFeedNews #FOIA lawsuit for the HSBC monitor's report, the govt submitted a declaration revealing that it was withholding the report because its release would interfere with an ongoing law enforcement case out of EDNY