Laundered Russian Cash Went Through Big Banks, Guardian Says
- HSBC allegedly handled about $545 million tied to network
- Paper cites documents detailing 70,000 banking transactions
An employee loads Russian 500 ruble denomination banknotes into a counting machine at the Thomas Exchange Global Ltd. foreign currency exchange in London on Dec. 17, 2014.
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/BloombergCash that flowed from Russia through a vast money-laundering network sometimes ended up passing through the world’s largest banks, with U.K. firms including HSBC Holdings Plc handling almost $740 million, the Guardian reported, citing a cache of financial records it reviewed.
The documents contain details of about 70,000 banking transactions, including 1,920 involving firms based in the U.K. and 373 in the U.S., the newspaper said. The records indicate at least $20 billion moved out of Russia between 2010 and 2014, and that some of it ended up at overseas banks. The flows are tied to a network dubbed the Global Laundromat, the subject of a 2014 report by the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism group that provided some of the documents, the paper said.