Press Release
‘London Is the World Center of Drug Money-laundering’
June 2016
HSBC logo. |
Photo credit: West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Cash seized by police from a bedroom in Shropshire, U.K. in 2012. |
May 27, 2016 (EIRNS)—Italian book author Roberto Saviano held a speech in the House of Commons May 26, exposing London as the world center of money laundering. Saviano had been invited by Labour MPer David Lammy, who had told the Independent that he is afraid that the home-price bubble in London is inflated by drug money.
Saviano was also scheduled to speak at King’s College. The text of his speech at the House of Commons is available only in Italian so far. However, he granted an interview to the Independent on Sunday, in which what he said had more or less the same content.
"The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world’s drug trade, according to an internationally acclaimed crime expert. ’UK banks and financial services have ignored so-called "know your customer" rules designed to curb criminals’ abilities to launder the proceeds of crime,’ Roberto Saviano warned. Mr Saviano, author of the international bestseller Gomorrah, which exposed the workings of the Neapolitan crime organisation Camorra, said: "The British treat it as not their problem because there aren’t corpses on the street."
"His warning follows a National Crime Agency (NCA) threat assessment which stated: ‘We assess that hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year.’"
On drug traffic, "Mexico is its heart and London is its head," Saviano said. Saviano referred to former UN anti-Drug Czar Antonio Maria Costa, who said that banks have been dependent on drug money because of the crisis of liquidity, and described the case of HSBC, which was fined a giant sum of money by US authority, but this had no repercussions in the UK.
"‘The biggest UK bank! Yet it has scarcely been written about. The British treat it as not their problem, because there aren’t corpses on the streets.(...) Cameron has said nothing. It’s his country. How can he say nothing on such a piece of news?’"
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