Oh yes, we’ve all been reading a good deal recently about the machinations of HSBC, the bank that makes all the other banks look, if not benign, certainly less loathsome. Infamous for its money-laundering activities, it’s also been in the news lately for foreign currency manipulations, precious metal price rigging, and its superlative efforts in helping its clients hide their money from those pesky tax authorities.
More recently the big news has been the disclosure that it’s CEO enjoys a 7.7 million dollar Swiss bank account into which he funneled money using a Panamanian shell company in order, he claims, only to prevent his colleagues from learning the size of his embarrassing bonuses. Ummm yes.
But all that’s just the introduction to this post. Last week the estimable blog SAR posted a link to a repost by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge of an article by Submitted by the Drug Trafficking & Narco-Terrorism Department of GreatGameIndia under the title “HSBC Bank : Secret Origins To 26/11 Mumbai Attacks“.
Well yes, so of course i clicked. And discovered that that title was just a teaser from the introduction to the article, the central thesis of which is that:
For years, when banks have been caught laundering drug money, they have claimed that they did not know, that they were but victims of sneaky drug dealers and a few corrupt employees. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that a considerable portion of the global banking system is explicitly dedicated to handling the enormous volume of cash produced daily by dope traffickers.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is not “demand” from the world’s population which creates the mind destroying drug trade. Rather, it is the world financial oligarchy, looking for massive profits and the destruction of the minds of the population it is determined to dominate, which organized the drug trade.
This long article at least partially substantiates those charges by providing the historical background all the way from the British initiation of the opium trade in China through to contemporary drug skulduggery.
Does it contain unsubstantiated allegations? Yes, lots. But much of the historical record it details is well documented elsewhere, and the contemporary allegations sure do fit in nicely and have an odor of plausibility.
I found the article fascinating reading, so here’s the link again.
One editorial note: The article is Indian, so it uses the term “crore”, one of the numbers in the traditional Indian numbering system for which there is no English word. A crore is “ten million”.
Oh, and when you’ve finished that article, you might want to take a look at some of the other material on GreatGameIndia. Interesting site.
Meanwhile, since i don’t have an appropriate pic, here’s some South of Market construction:
