Leaked documents involving about $2tn of transactions have revealed how some of the world’s biggest banks have allowed criminals to move dirty money around the world.
They also show how Russian oligarchs have used banks to avoid sanctions that were supposed to stop them getting their money into the West.
It’s the latest in a string of leaks over the past five years that have exposed secret deals, money laundering and financial crime.
What are the FinCEN files?
The FinCEN files are more than 2,500 documents, most of which were files that banks sent to the US authorities between 2000 and 2017. They raise concerns about what their clients might be doing.
These documents are some of the international banking system’s most closely guarded secrets.
Banks use them to report suspicious behaviour but they are not proof of wrongdoing or crime.
They were leaked to Buzzfeed News and shared with a group that brings together investigative journalists from around the world, which distributed them to 108 news organisations in 88 countries, including the BBC’s Panorama programme.
Hundreds of journalists have been sifting through the dense, technical documentation, uncovering some of the activities that banks would prefer the public not to know about.
Getty
FinCEN Files
2,657documents including
2,121 Suspicious Activity Reports
Source: ICIJ
Two acronyms you need to know
FinCEN is the US Financial Crimes Investigation Network. These are the people at the US Treasury who combat financial crime. Concerns about transactions made in US dollars need to be sent to FinCEN, even if they took place outside the US.
Suspicious activity reports, or SARs, are an example of how those concerns are recorded. A bank must fill in one of these reports if it is worried one of its clients might be up to no good. The report is sent to the authorities.
Why does this matter?
If you are planning to profit from a criminal enterprise, one of the most important things to have in place is a way of laundering the money.
Laundering money is the process of taking dirty money – the proceeds of crimes such as drug dealing or corruption – and getting it into an account at a respected bank where it will not be linked with the crime.
The same process is needed if you are a Russian oligarch whom Western countries have taken sanctions against to stop you getting your money into the West.
Banks are supposed to make sure they don’t help clients to launder money or move it around in ways that break the rules.
By law, they have to know who their clients are – it’s not enough to file SARs and keep taking dirty money from clients while expecting the authorities to deal with the problem. If they have evidence of criminal activity they should stop moving the cash.
Fergus Shiel from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) said the leaked files were an “insight into what banks know about the vast flows of dirty money across the globe”.
He said the documents also highlighted the extraordinarily large amounts of money involved. The documents in the FinCEN files cover about $2tn of transactions and they are only a tiny proportion of the SARs submitted over the period.
JP Morgan allowed a company to move more than $1bn through a London account without knowing who owned it. The bank later discovered the company might be owned by a mobster on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.
The UK is called a “higher risk jurisdiction” like Cyprus, according to the intelligence division of FinCEN. That’s because of the number of UK registered companies that appear in the SARs. Over 3,000 UK companies are named in the FinCEN files – more than any other country.
Deutsche Bank moved money launderers’ dirty money for organised crime, terrorists and drug traffickers. More details (BuzzFeed News)
Standard Chartered moved cash for Arab Bank for more than a decade after clients’ accounts at the Jordanian bank had been used in funding terrorism.
Image copyrightEPAImage caption Canary Wharf, the heart of London’s banking network
Why is this leak different?
There have been a number of big leaks of financial information in recent years, including:
2017 Paradise Papers – A huge batch of leaked documents from an offshore legal service provider Appleby and corporate services provider Estera. The two operated together under the Appleby name until Estera became independent in 2016. They revealed the offshore financial dealings of politicians, celebrities and business leaders
2015 Swiss Leaks – Documents from HSBC’s Swiss private bank showed how it was using the country’s banking secrecy laws to help clients avoid paying tax
The FinCEN papers are different because they are not just documents from one or two companies – they come from a number of banks.
They highlight a range of potentially suspicious activity involving companies and individuals and also raise questions about why the banks which had noticed this activity did not always act on their concerns.
FinCEN said the leak could impact on US national security, compromise investigations, and threaten the safety of institutions and individuals who file the reports.
Drawing on two decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the biggest, most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. Aral shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior-influencing levers to both Russian hackers and brand marketers—to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth to the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids.
In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.
Earlier this week, scientists announced the discovery of phosphine on Venus, a potential signature of life. Now, in an amazing coincidence, a European and Japanese spacecraft is about to fly past the planet – and could confirm the discovery.
On Monday, September 14, a team of scientists said they had found evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. The region in which it was found, about 50 kilometers above the surface, is outside the harsh conditions on the Venusian surface, and could be a habitat for airborne microbes.
[…]
And as luck would have it, a joint mission comprising two spacecraft – one from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the other from the Japanese space agency (JAXA) – is about to fly past Venus that could tell us for sure.
BepiColombo, launched in 2018, is on its way to enter orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System. But to achieve that it plans to use two flybys of Venus to slow itself down, one on October 15, 2020, and another on August 10, 2021.
BepiColombo launched on October 19, 2018.
AFP via Getty Images
The teams running the spacecraft already had plans to observe Venus during the flyby. But now, based on this detection of phosphine from telescopes on Earth, they are now planning to use both of these flybys to look for phosphine using an instrument on the spacecraft.
“We possibly could detect phosphine,” says ESA’s Johannes Benkhoff, BepiColombo’s Project Scientist. “But we do not know if our instrument is sensitive enough.”
The instrument on the European side of the mission, called MERTIS (MErcury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer), is designed to study the composition of the surface of Mercury. However, the team believe they can also use it to study the atmospheric composition of Venus during both flybys.
On this first flyby, the spacecraft will get no closer than 10,000 kilometers from Venus. That’s very far, but potentially still close enough to make a detection.
“There actually is something in the spectral range of MERTIS,” says Jörn Helbert from the German Aerospace Center, co-lead on the MERTIS instrument. “So we are now seeing if our sensitivity is good enough to do observations.”
Phosphine could be a biosignature of life in the Venusian atmosphere.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Peter Rubin
As this first flyby is only weeks away, however, the observation campaign of the spacecraft is already set in stone, making the chance of a discovery slim. More promising is the second flyby next year, which will not only give the team more time to prepare, but also approach just 550 kilometers from Venus.
“[On the first flyby] we have to get very, very lucky,” says Helbert . “On the second one, we only have to get very lucky. But it’s really at the limit of what we can do.”
There’s a new development in the high-profile game of chicken between Apple and Epic. The Fortnite developer’s latest legal filing claims that Apple “cherry-picked” Google data in its own legal filing earlier this week to support its narrative that Fortnite’s declining popularity is the impetus behind all this drama.
Apple has repeatedly argued that Epic started the legal battle over Fortnite in its App Store as a publicity stunt because the game’s hypehas started to flatline. In a filing Tuesday, it said that interest in Fortnite had fallen “by nearly 70%” between October 2019 and July 2020 according to Google Trends and that Epic’s lawsuit “appears to be part of a marketing campaign designed to reinvigorate interest in Fortnite.”
But Epic’s calling bullshit on those claims, citing its own user engagement data as proof that the Fortnite hype train is still chugging along just fine, thank you.
“Over the period of time that Apple cherry-picked for its Google search volume comparison… the number of daily active users on Fortnite actually increased by more than 39%,” the company wrote in reply papers filed late Friday evening.
Not to mention that Apple’s decision to cite Google Trends, of all things, is already suspect to begin with. It measures the volume of searches for any given term, but even if people aren’t searching for Fortnite on Google as much as they used to be, that doesn’t prove a correlation between how many people are still playing or downloading the game. I’d put money on this being an Occam’s broom scenario: Apple just went with that statistic because it was the only one they found that proved their point.
As a recap, Apple booted Fortnite off its App Store in August after Epic’s theatrical attempt to circumvent its so-called “Apple Tax,” which requires that developers fork over 30% of revenue from in-app purchases for the privilege of having their app on iOS. The two have been playing a melodramatic game of tit-for-tat ever since. Epic immediately sued, of course, then Apple terminated its App Store developer account for iOS. After that, Epic vowed not to push the Aug. 27 Fortnite update to iOS or macOS in retaliation, and Apple launched a countersuit for compensatory and punitive damages, calling Epic’s actions a deliberate attempt to undermine its iOS ecosystem.
The drama is still playing out in court, with a full court hearing scheduled for Sept. 28. In the case’s first hearing in August, a judge ruled that Apple could kick Fortnite off its App Store but not Epic’s Unreal Engine. Epic has also asked the court to restore both Fortnite and its developer accountin the App Store.
It’s likely these two will continue to take jabs at one another throughout this legal drama, so you might as well settle in and grab some popcorn as these incendiary press releases keep flying.
The most widely used variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is currently unable to fly in thunderstorms after the discovery of damage to one of the systems it uses to protect itself from lightning, its prime contractor Lockheed Martin said Wednesday.
To safely fly in conditions where lightning is present, the F-35 relies on its Onboard Inert Gas Generation System, or OBIGGS, which pumps nitrogen-enriched air into the fuel tanks to inert them. Without this system, a jet could explode if struck by lightning.
However, damage to one of the tubes that distributes inert gas into the fuel tank was discovered during routine depot maintenance of an F-35A at Hill Air Force Base’s Ogden Logistics Complex in Utah, Lockheed said in a statement.
[…]
“As a safety precaution, the JPO recommended to unit commanders that they implement a lightning flight restriction for the F-35A, which restricts flying within 25 miles of lightning or thunderstorms,” Lockheed said. “We are working with the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) on a root cause corrective action investigation to determine next steps.”
[…]
Bloomberg, which obtained a JPO memo dated June 5, reported that flawed tubes were found in 14 of the 24 “A” models inspected.
The JPO did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
For a plane nicknamed “Lightning II,” the F-35′s lightning protection systems have, ironically, become an embarrassing problem issue for the jet at times throughout its development.
The F-35 was prohibited from flying within 25 miles of lightning in the early 2010s after the Pentagon’s weapons tester discovered deficiencies with the original OBIGGs system in getting enough inert gas into the fuel tanks. Those restrictions were rescinded after the OBIGGS was redesigned in 2014.
