(Week 6)
Article Evaluation (State capture)
The wikipedia article I chose to evaluate is that of “State Capture”. There is a lot of information about the concept, the definition is sound and the article even cites when the term was first used. However, I do agree with the commentary on the Talk page regarding the definition, it could use more clarification and detail. I do not think the definition is the best, it is cited by “The University of the West Indies” perhaps they can find a definition for a more widely known source. Also the article could use more sources to go more into depth on the definition of “State Capture” there are only four, compared to the 25 sources cited for the topic of state capture in South Africa. The overall article seems fairly neutral, and there doesn’t appear to be any biased claims or reports. The “State Capture Examples” could also use some work, there are only three examples: Bulgaria, Latin America, and South Africa. The source the author cited for Bulgaria is not in English and the link it is attached to does not work. Also the information under Bulgaria and Latin America is not detailed enough it is only around 50 words per section and is completely underrepresented especially compared to South Africa. South Africa’s section is 9 paragraphs long, which seems unreasonable. They could add more sub categories other than just “Defining state capture” and “State capture examples” such as: Causes, Effects, Types of State Capture, etc. There are 33 sources, all of which seem to check out except for the one mentioned above and they all seem to be reputable and sound.
(Week 7)
Potential topics
- 1) State Capture
- Would improve on everything I noted above, would be a good article because there is plenty of information about it on the internet and the article has plenty of room for improvement.
- 2) Gupta family
- there is a lot of content on the talk page
- 3) Operation Car Wash
- There is a lot of talk on the talk page about the translation of "Operation car wash" which does not seem very useful.
- Other commentary includes that on the "Impact on Politics" section, users are stating they do not stress how much the scandal impacted the presidential campaign in 2014.
- 4) HSBC Mexico
- More specifically I would like to focus on the "Money Laundering" section, and talk about the HSBC money laundering scandal in Mexico. perhaps I could create a new page for it as a whole.
- There is no commentary on the "Talk" page at all.
(Week 10)
Broad Outline for Wikipedia draft
Still Unsure if I will be adding to and further elaborating on the Mexico HSBC article or if I will make a completely new Wikipedia page dedicated to the HSBC Mexico/Money laundering scandal. If so am still working on how to separate all the information into headers/sub headers.
- Mexico City
- Banks move millions of dollars every day for the Cartels
- Government of Mexico along with its government officials and police force are all corruption entities
- Cross border smuggling has been a big thing for a long time
- Mexicans get paid to smuggle drugs over the border into the United States
- Often times via cars
- Money Laundering issues arise when the drugs are brought into the states and then how does Mexico get its money back?
- Moving the drugs is easy, how does one move the money?
- American consumers pay USD for the drugs, now they are presented of getting that money out of the US in order to get it into the illicit financial system
- Street money: 1, 5, 10s, 20s: hundreds of pounds of cash
- US > Mexico: Money from the drugs is brought into Mexico
- American Cash into Mexico, where do they go from there?
- Move money through the banks and legal systems
- Banco Bital
- Great presence on Mexican territory, particularly in Sinaloa, which is an area of drug production
- Large presence of cash coming in with no regulations
- HSBC had a system of ranking how risky banking was
- Standard was the lowest
- Medium
- Cautionary
- High
- HSBC in partnering up with Bital ranked it as “Standard” regardless of their close involvement with the town of Sinaloa
- Institutional decision was made to not look closely into transactions involving Bital
- When HSBC bought Bital they bought all these bank accounts that belong to the members of the cartels
- Cartel money that went from working with regional Mexican bank was now starting to work for these transnational bank
- People that used to work for corrupt MExican banks start to work for transational banks
- Sinaloa wanted to move into meth in a big way
- Zhenli Ye Gon comes in, owns a Pharma business that imports chemicals that can be used to make Meth
- Born in shanghai but was a Mexican National
- Police raid his house and find 205$ million USD and had been doing a lot of banking additionally
- Turns out he was doing all his banking with HSBC and there had been a trail of suspicious transaction involving his accounts
- HSBC London told them to close his account in 2004
- HSBC Mexico unable to police it’s clients correctly
- In 2010 the OCC issued a 31 page order describing money laundering problems in HSBC
- Put HSBC on notice that suspicious activity with the bank had been uncovered
- Bank was ordered to look back at it’s transactions
- Ofac Sancitons List
- Full of companies they can’t deal with because of known ties to cartels, terrorists, mobsters, and other criminals
- TAJCO: was on the list of these alerts of which transactions were being done with
- This company was known to be associated with terrorists
- Tajideen Brothers
- 1000s transaction approved that were dealing with them
- Were criminally manipulating the wire filter by altering the names of these organizations by addings periods or dashes to their names soo the system wouldn’t block them
- HSBC London saw this and did nothing
- Allowing dirty money to run through the US
- Lax control control of dealings between 2006-2009
- Executives knew what they were doing
- “We are allowing organized criminals to launder their money”
- Sinaloa Cartel involved
- Did not deny any of the facts, said they were going to do better
- “Specifically HSBC Bank USA ignored the money laundering risks associated with doing business with certain Mexican customers and failed to implement a BSA.AML program that was adequate to monitor suspicious transactions. As result of these concurrent AML failures at least $881 million in drug trafficking proceeds including proceeds of drug trafficking by the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico and the Norte de Valle cartel in Colombia were laundered through HSBC Bank USA without being detected”
Netflix, Dirty Money Episode 4 "
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