From Britain's Financial Services
Authority - on a fine it has slapped on the Royal Bank of Scotland
Group.
RBSG could have facilitated
transactions involving sanctions targets, including terrorist financing.
This
sort of thing - entirely lax and negligent procedures for stopping
dirty money - is core business for the City of London, day after day.
The
Royal Bank of Scotland is, on some measures, the biggest bank in the world, it
seems, with a balance sheet whose size exceeds $ 3 trillion - fifteen times the Gross Domestic
Product of Scotland (OK, these numbers may be a tad out of date, but the
orders of magnitude are right) and revenues of $113 billion last year. And the
size of the fine for creating money laundering facilities?
£5.6m, or less than US$9 million. That
is, 0.005 percent - about one thirteen-thousandth - of its revenues
last year. They must be screaming. And now get this, again from the FSA:
"This is the biggest fine imposed by the FSA to
date in pursuit of its financial crime objective."
The
City of London, deliberately setting out to be the global epicentre of
financial laxity, money laundering and crime. If you want more on this
theme, you might look here. Oh, and the response from RBS is,
predictably, the usual: "everything's OK now. Problem solved."
By www.taxjustice.net
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