HSBC was caught sneaking Iran money through the United States five years ago and was fined hundreds of million of dollars. But this was the first time the full scale of its illegal activities was reported.
US banking rules barred Iranian entities was using the US banking system more than decade ago.
But HSBC executives allowed and even encouraged its staff to strip all identifying Iranian information from documentation as early as 2001 and allowed thousands of transactions to continue through 2007, according to the Senate report.
A review of HSBC’s use of so-called U-turn transactions, in which funds are sent into and then out of the United States through non-Iranian foreign banks, showed the bank conducted almost 25,000 US dollar transactions with Iran, amounting to $19.4 billion.
“The vast majority of the Iranian transactions, ranging from 75-90 percent over the years, were sent through HBUS [the bank’s US operation] and other US dollar accounts without disclosing any connection to Iran,” according to the report by the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations. Seventy-five percent of the total of $19.4 billion would amount to $14.5 billion in illegal transactions.
