Drug warrior Jeff Sessions lets a megabank skate on laundering money intoMexico
The government has agreed not to prosecute Citigroup’s Mexico-based subsidiary despite damning evidence it aided a cross-border money-laundering scheme for years, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. The non-prosecution agreement is in sharp contrast with the hard line that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has already laid out for blue-collar criminals.
Under the non-prosecution agreement, Citigroup-owned Banamex USA will pay $97.4 million and admit it broke the Bank Secrecy Act for years.
Banamex and Citi officials knew of some 18,000 separate suspicious account activities from 2007 to 2012 yet reported just six to regulators, according to the description of the crimes in the deal. The transactions mostly involved remittance payments from people in the United States to account holders in Mexico — a standard class of transaction relied upon heavily by immigrants.
The transactions Citigroup failed to police internally or report to external authorities, however, were not typical worker remittances. Those usually involve small sums and scattered movements of money — as one would expect to see when a large group of individual workers are sending some of their pay back home to a large number of families.
https://thinkprogress.org/jeff-sessions-soft-on-banks-tough-on-minor-offenses-7380295efc0
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