Over $10 billion in illicit funds are laundered into the U.S. per year, according to a report in the Financial Times. As Breitbart Texas previously reported, the U.S. government recently enacted tough controls on banking institutions in an effort to stem the flow of Mexican cartels’ narco-profits through U.S. banks. Several large U.S.-based banking institutions recently began closing down branches near the U.S.-Mexico border in efforts to comply with the restrictions.
The Financial Times article, “Mexico: Clearing Out,” detailed banking industry sources who claimed that legitimate financial business and transactions were being affected or even damaged due to the new restrictions and counter-money laundering efforts. They wrote:
The crackdown on money laundering has not necessarily curtailed the practice, but instead may simply have pushed it further underground. The up to $10bn in illicit cash that used to flow through the system is still going to the US, the senior Mexican banker says: “It’s just no longer on the radar.”
Another previous article by Breitbart Texas details the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of Mexican cartel money laundering into the U.S. banking system. Bob Price wrote:
World banking giant, HSBC, got caught with its hand in a money laundering scheme that helped drug cartels turn nearly a billion dollars in narco-cash into gold. HSBC only faced a fine for their complicity, but members of money-laundering organizations (MLO) are now facing up to twenty years.
The fine for HSBC was huge, yet no banking executives lost their freedom for their dastardly complicity in Mexico’s raging drug war. The Sinaloa cartel’s alleged man in the plot did not get the same treatment from U.S. authorities, according to Michael Daly at the Daily Beast.