The Reserve Bank is looking into the issue of non-compliance of anti-money laundering norms by the Indian staff of HSBC raised by a US Senate Committee, a senior Finance Ministry official said on Thursday.
“I am confident that RBI is looking at it (HSBC issue). I am aware of it. They are very conscious of the issue,” Department of Financial Services Secretary D.K. Mittal told reporters here.
He said the finance ministry would assist the RBI with the required inputs. “HSBC is a regulatory issue. It is for RBI to comment. If they need any input from us they will have to tell us,” Mr. Mittal said.
HSBC’s India staff have come under the scanner for deficiencies in their role as “offshore reviewers” of the global banking giant’s compliance to safety mechanism against money laundering and terrorist financing.
A probe by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations found that HSBC’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Compliance Department, which included employees in India, was highly inadequately staffed.
Besides, deficiencies were found in the quality of the work done by HSBC’s “offshore reviewers in India”, who were used for clearing a major backlog of suspected transaction alerts at the bank.
Keywords: money-laundering, HSBC Bank, U.S. Senate, U.S. Treasury, State Department, terror financing, regulatory scandal
Just yesterday, another newspaper revealed that "According to the [Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations'] 340-page report, the HSBC in 2009 authorised its affiliate to supply Indian rupees to Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Bank, which, the report said, has links to financing terrorism." and "In addition, at Al Rajhi Bank’s request, HSB-US expanded the relationship in January 2009, by authorising its Hong Kong branch to supply Al Rajhi Bank with non-US currencies, including the Thai bat, Indian rupee, and Hong Kong dollar." USA seems to be waking up. India is still in deep slumber, as if we have been drugged. Paraphrasing the Tryst with Destiny, "when the world wakes up, India will continue to sleep and dream of secularism".
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