It was the bankers’ fear of being tarnished by their links with the Vatican bank after the credit crisis – and fears of fines from emboldened regulators – that led them to take steps that forced it to clean up its act.
.. As much as 25 per cent of the bank’s business is done in cash – a feature that regulators said raised red flags for money laundering.
.. Popes Benedict and John Paul II both had their bedrooms two floors above the bank
.. Deutsche did what regulators had hoped it would. On January 1 2013, a peak holiday time, there were no ATMs functioning anywhere inside Vatican City. Lines of visitors to the Sistine Chapel were unable to enter unless they paid in cash. “The message sent was simple: if you want to participate in the modern world, you have to adopt modern rules,” says a senior banker at another correspondent bank.
America prosecutes its interests and persecutes BNP
You cannot send money to Cuba – not from New York, not from London and not from Madrid, Manila or Managua. We all know why: it is because the US has a beef with Cuba.
America is using its banking laws not to make its financial system safer, nor to protect its own citizens from predatory financial behaviour, but rather to advance foreign policy and national security objectives. Only in America, for instance, would citizens have to apply to the finance ministry in order to get a visa to visit Cuba.
.. So far, criminal prosecutors seem more interested in prosecuting US foreign policy than in protecting the American people from the malefactors who were responsible for vaporising trillions of dollars in household wealth and adding tens of millions to the unemployment lines. So long as those banks go unpunished, the rest of the world can be forgiven for seeing a double standard at play.