 |
| Go 60 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Reports at the weekend said that as many as 60 politicians are being investigated by Greece’s financial crimes squad, otherwise known as SDOE, for suspected tax evasion and other financial crimes.
The figure is nearly double earlier estimates that put the number of officials under scrutiny between 32 and 36. SDOE has so far refused to confirm that the names which appeared last week in the local media are, in fact, on the list. Sources apparently told Kathimerini that the actual list includes the names of three government officials, as well as of a number of former ministers and MPs.
The biggest majority of them, some 29 politicians, served in the Attica district, according to the same sources. Eight are politicians elected in Thessaloniki. The list is now in the hands of Supreme Court deputy prosecutor Nikolaos Pantelis, and he is expected to begin investigating the case right away.
Meanwhile, PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos (otherwise known as Evangelos the LARGE) is also under fire, over his handling of the electronic file given to Athens in 2010 by then-French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde containing the names of approximately 2,000 Greeks with unexplainable deposits in a Geneva branch of HSBC.
He still hasn't given a convincing reason as to why he held on to this information and some blogs in Greece are even hinting that he may of tampered with the list. It is almost like he is protecting something or someone. And the reason is why?
Well... surprise surprise. This particular bank is not an ordinary HSBC branch -not even by HSBC or Swiss standards-.
It was the head bank of the late Edmond Safra’s Republic National Bank of New-York where private banking was the name for secretly held multi-million accounts.
In fact HellasFrappe featured a story about this several months ago.
Jack Blum, who spent 14 years with the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigating drug-money laundering, wrote an op-ed published in Politico on Aug 1, saying that after reading the Senate report on the case of money laundering involving Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (see SAS 30/2012), the largest British and European bank, “I am convinced that HSBC should be criminally prosecuted. So should its responsible officers and board members. The report and follow-up hearings have shown that the bank has knowingly violated many criminal laws.” Blum recalls the case of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which was investigated and found guilty of crimes in the late 1980s, then “was closed and its leadership was prosecuted. HSBC deserves the same treatment.”
Blum mocked the fact that the U.S. Justice Department is negotiating a $1 billion fine for HSBC, but allowing the bank to continue business, calling this no more than a “parking ticket,” given the size of HSBC and its profits. “Congress included a provision in the laws against money laundering that requires the government to revoke the banking license of firms that violate the law,” Blum writes. “Americans have been asking why there have been virtually no prosecutions of banks or bankers in the wake of the financial crisis. We have all heard complaints about the difficulty of making the case and identifying responsible individuals. Here is a case that cries out for real prosecutorial action.”
The so-called LIBOR-gate scandal and the HSBC money laundering case are actually one and the same operation, a criminal effort organized by the London-centered transatlantic megabank syndicate and the central banks they control, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank.
A large percentage of the conservative estimate of $800 billion per year cash flow of organized crime money generated from narcotics trafficking, was sucked into the banking systems after the 2007-2008 freeze-up of the London City centered interbank market (with its LIBOR rate), and combined with massive central bank money pumping, largely led by Timothy Geithner, head of the Federal Reserve Board of New York (FRBNY) from 2004-2010. This included massive currency swaps set up then, which are still going on today. During his tenure at the New York Fed, for years Geithner failed to act on financial intelligence routinely gathered from member banks, which pointed to massive cash transactions of numerous member banks, bringing in dollars from Mexican cocaine traffickers.
Read more about this bank by clicking here
So why would Evangelos the Large be holding on to a list of names of tax evaders who have their money in a bank that -as noted by the reports- was linked to scandals such as money laundering and illegal arms sales? Hmmmm....
Looks like things are going to get pretty interesting in the days to come...
Stay tuned frappers
Posts
