After the Panama Papers, here is a new global investigation that has been made possible thanks to what are called Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs, suspicious activity reports) sent by American banks when they detect questionable funds transfers.

The SARs are intended for the American financial intelligence service FinCEN ( Financial Crimes Enforcement Network ), at the heart of the global system for combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism. 2,100 of these confidential documents, which we have chosen to call the FinCEN Files, were obtained by the online media BuzzFeed News, which shared them with the ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists). The latter then put together a team of more than 400 journalists working for 110 media outlets in 88 countries, in order to analyze and investigate them. In France, the investigation unit of Radio France and Le Monde got involved in this project.

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2 trillion dollars: a drop of water in an ocean of dirty money

The FinCEN Files have identified at least $2 trillion in suspicious transactions between 2000 and 2017, of which $514 billion relate to JPMorgan Bank, and $1.3 trillion to Deutsche Bank. It should be noted that these suspicious activity reports reveal doubts about the origin of the funds, but do not necessarily constitute proof of fraud.

However, it is reasonable to think that the 2,000 billion dollars of suspicious transactions identified in this set of documents, an already considerable amount, are only a drop in the flood of dirty money circulating in the banks of the world. whole. FinCEN files represent less than 0.02% of the more than 12 million suspicious activity reports that financial institutions made between 2011 and 2017.

Other very revealing documents

In addition to the files from FinCEN, the ICIJ and its partners, including the investigation unit of Radio France, had access to more than 17,000 additional documents from whistleblowers, court files, and other sources. Some of these documents were collected as part of the United States Congress' investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. FinCEN by legal authorities. These files offer unprecedented insight into the secretive world of big banks, their anonymous customers and, in many cases, financial crime.

Practices that have never stopped

First lesson of this major survey: despite their declarations of intent, many banks make do with questionable money. The American authorities, which play a leading role in the global fight against money laundering, had ordered them to reform their practices. They fined them sometimes hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, and threatened them with criminal prosecution under so-called deferred prosecution agreements. Our 16-month investigation conducted by the ICIJ and its partners, however, shows that major banks continue to play a central role in the transfer of funds linked to corruption, fraud, organized crime and terrorism.

Five bad students

The analysis of these secret documents makes it possible more generally to target five global banks: JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon. Among them, in 2012, HSBC, Europe's largest bank, based in London, admitted to laundering at least $881 million on behalf of drug cartels in Latin America. As part of a settlement reached with prosecutors, HSBC paid out $1.9 billion. In return, the government agreed to suspend the criminal proceedings against her, and offered to drop them after five years if HSBC kept its commitment to fight against dirty money.

And yet... During this five-year probationary period, the FinCEN Files show that HSBC continued to transfer money on behalf of dubious characters, some of whom are suspected of laundering Russian money, feed a Ponzi scheme, and are under investigation in several countries. Despite this, the US government allowed HSBC to announce in December 2017 that the bank had "fulfilled all of its commitments" . The prosecutors have therefore definitively waived any prosecution against the bank.

HSBC declined to answer questions from the ICIJ about its customers or specific transactions. According to the bank, our information is "old and pre-dates" the five-year deferred prosecution agreement. During this period, the bank maintains that it "has embarked on a struggle of several years to review its ability to fight financial crime" , specifying that it "is a much safer institution than it was . in 2012" .

When a bank is accused of financing terrorism

For some financial institutions, the potentially problematic customer turns out to be another bank. We see it through this affair which goes back to 2003. That morning, Steven Averbach is in the bus n° 648 in Jerusalem. He sees a man rushing to board. The latter wears black pants, a white shirt and a black jacket, the typical attire of an Orthodox Jew. But he also wears "pointed-toe shoes" which do not correspond to the traditional dress. And in his right hand is a strange case.

Steven Averbach, who previously served as chief weapons instructor for the Jerusalem police, pulls out his handgun. But as the former police officer turns to the individual, "the latter blew himself up" , testified Steven Averbach later in a video deposition. The explosion kills seven people and injures 20 others, leaving Steven Averbach paralyzed. He died in 2010 from his injuries.

In the meantime, he and his family have filed civil suits in a lawsuit in the United States. They accuse a Jordanian financial institution, the Arab Bank, of having transferred funds which made it possible to finance this attack as well as others.

A bank that "conspires"

The FinCEN Files show that the Arab Bank was then in a relationship with a much larger and more influential bank: Standard Chartered. This bank, headquartered in the United Kingdom, has helped Arab Bank customers access the American financial market, despite the failures found by regulators in the anti-money laundering system of Arab Bank in 2005. They had forced it to reduce its money transfer activities in the United States.

Standard Chartered continued its relationship with Arab Bank, however, including when the lawsuit against the Jordanian bank unfolded in US courts – and even after US authorities warned Standard Chartered that it should stop processing transactions in dollars from suspicious customers.

In 2012, New York regulators concluded that Standard Chartered "conspired with the Iranian government", carrying out $250 billion in secret transactions, earning "hundreds of millions of dollars in fees" and leaving "the system American financier vulnerable to terrorists, arms dealers, drug lords and corrupt regimes" . Standard Chartered had to pay a $227 million fine paid to US authorities in December 2012 as part of a deferred prosecution agreement.

The main office of Arab Bank is located in Amman (Jordan), here on August 16, 2014. (KHALIL MAZRAAWI / AFP)

Dangerous liaisons that last

FinCEN Files show that despite promises to weed out suspicious clients, Standard Chartered completed 2,055 transactions, worth more than $24 million, on behalf of Arab Bank clients between September 2013 and September 2014 .

In late September 2014, in a lawsuit filed in connection with the Jerusalem bus bombing, a Brooklyn jury found Arab Bank liable for knowingly supporting terrorism by transferring disguised money in charitable donations to Hamas, the Palestinian group considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

A year later, Standard Chartered's compliance staff send FinCEN a suspicious activity report noting that the bank's transactions with Arab Bank had taken place up to a few days after the verdict in Brooklyn, and expressing concerns concerns about "potential financing of terrorism" .

“There will always be money laundering attempts”

According to documents from the FinCEN Files, Standard Chartered indeed transferred nearly $12 million more on behalf of Arab Bank clients between the day after the verdict and February 2016. Many telegrams referring to "charities" , "donations" , "support" or "gifts" , appear there.

The verdict against Arab Bank was eventually overturned as the appeals court identified procedural flaws during the trial. Arab Bank then concluded an agreement with nearly 600 victims and relatives of victims, the amount of which was not disclosed.

Standard Chartered did not respond to questions from the ICIJ and its partners regarding the Arab Bank. The bank simply told us: "The reality of the global financial system is that there will always be attempts to launder money and to evade sanctions. The responsibility of banks is to put in place systems of control and effective oversight and we are working closely with regulators and law enforcement to bring perpetrators to justice."

Logo of the Standard Chartered bank, implicated in the FinCEN Files, in Hong Kong, August 2, 2017. (ISAAC LAWRENCE / AFP)

JPMorgan's role

Another bank often appearing in the FinCEN Files: JPMorgan. It paid $88.3 million in 2011 to pay fines imposed by regulators for violating the embargo imposed on Iran and other countries by the United States. US Treasury officials in 2013 denounced the bank's "systemic deficiencies" in combating money laundering, noting that it had "failed to identify significant volumes of suspicious activity" .

In January 2014, she paid US agencies $2.6 billion to end investigations into her role in setting up the Madoff system, who is currently serving a 150-year sentence in federal prison. JPMorgan had then posted profits of nearly 22 billion dollars.

But the FinCEN Files show that JPMorgan subsequently continued to move money on behalf of people involved in alleged financial crimes.

Jho Low: a fugitive partying in France

Among them: Jho Low, a businessman accused by the authorities of several countries of being the mastermind of the embezzlement of 4.5 billion dollars from a Malaysian economic development fund, called 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MBD). The businessman transferred just over $1.2 billion through JPMorgan from 2013 to 2016. Low first gained notoriety by partying with Paris Hilton, Leonardo DiCaprio and other other celebrities. One evening, in a club on the Côte d'Azur, he embarked on a bidding war for a case of Cristal champagne from the house of Louis Roederer, winning the competition with a final offer of two million euros, according to Billion Dollar Whale, a bestselling book on the 1MDB scam.

Singapore issued an arrest warrant for him in April 2016. Authorities in the United States and Malaysia are also looking for him.

The world headquarters of the bank JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, April 17, 2019. (JOHANNES EISELE / AFP)

Scandal in Venezuela

JPMorgan also transferred money on behalf of companies and individuals linked to corruption scandals in Venezuela that helped fuel the humanitarian crisis there.

In this case, JPMorgan notably hosted the account of a certain Alejandro "Piojo" Isturiz, a former official of the Venezuelan government. He is accused by US authorities of being involved in a vast international money laundering scheme. Between 2011 and 2013, prosecutors suspect him of having solicited bribes to favor entrepreneurs working in the energy sector when awarding public contracts. The FinCEN Files show that the bank thus transferred more than 63 million dollars on behalf of companies linked to Piojo Isturiz and the money laundering system he set up between 2012 and 2016.

Five billion dollars without a tender

Secret documents we have analyzed show that JPMorgan also had a client of Derwick Associates, an electricity supply company that won more than $5 billion in untendered contracts to fix the grid. Failing Electricity in Venezuela. A 2018 investigation by the Venezuela branch of the NGO Transparency International concluded that the company had overcharged the Venezuelan government by at least $2.9 billion.

The FinCEN Files reveal that Derwick used accounts housed at JPMorgan to transfer at least $2.1 million in 2011 and 2012, and that the bank processed other transactions for Derwick and his managers, at least until 2013 .

Asked, his lawyer said: "My client denies any wrongdoing." JPMorgan Bank, for its part, recalls having recognized in 2014 that it needed to improve its anti-money laundering controls and that since then it has invested “considerable resources” in this effort.

The Paul Manafort case

JPMorgan has also accepted more than $50 million in 10-year deposits from Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign manager. The bank completed at least $6.5 million in transactions on his behalf in the 14 months after he quit the campaign, when he was already the subject of money laundering allegations, and of corruption, in connection with his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

JPMorgan had nevertheless committed to improving its controls in the fight against money laundering within the framework of agreements concluded with the American authorities in 2011, 2013 and 2014.

The bank told us that they were legally prohibited from answering our questions about transactions or customers. It claims to be "at the forefront in the fight against money laundering" by pursuing "proactive investigations based on intelligence" and by developing "innovative techniques to help combat financial crime" .

Donald Trump (L), Paul Manafort, his campaign manager (C), and Ivanka Trump (D), on July 21, 2016, in Clevland (Ohio, United States), during the Republican convention. (BROOKS KRAFT/CORBIS NEWS)

Banks that report only in dribs and drabs

These FinCEN Files also show that banks often only write suspicious activity reports when a transaction or a customer has already been the subject of a negative article in the press, or when the bank is approached on occasion. of a judicial or administrative inquiry.

In interviews with the ICIJ and BuzzFeed News, more than a dozen former compliance officers at HSBC questioned the effectiveness of the bank's anti-money laundering programs. Some said they were not given enough resources to go beyond a superficial examination of large money flows. And that when asking for information about the people behind big deals, HSBC branches outside the US often ignored them.

"They were like, 'Of course, we'll get back to you.' But they never came back,” recalls Alexis Grullon, who oversaw suspicious international activity for HSBC in New York from 2012 to 2014.

Employees "threatened, harassed and fired"

At Standard Chartered Bank, a lawsuit was filed in December 2019 in federal court in New York. The plaintiffs, Julian Knight and Anshuman Chandra, argue that employees who objected to illegal transactions were not ignored, but "threatened, harassed and terminated" . They claim they were forced out of their senior roles at the bank after it learned they had cooperated with the FBI, which was investigating money transfers Standard Chartered had made from sanctioned countries from the United States, such as Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma.

The complaint states that Standard Chartered engaged in a "highly sophisticated money laundering scheme" , changing the names of parties subject to US sanctions on transaction documents, and creating a technological circumvention system. , allowing illegal transactions to go undetected by the Federal Reserve of the United States.

Standard Chartered did not respond to questions from the ICIJ and its partners regarding the allegations by its ex-employees. In documents in the legal proceedings against it, however, Standard Chartered said the allegations were implausible and baseless.