Cruz told WND earlier today the federal government’s decision to settle with HSBC instead of pursuing criminal charges is “a joke,” alleging the amount of money the bank has laundered internationally amounts to trillions of dollars.
“This bank is organized crime,” said Cruz. “I can’t see how our government is even thinking about settling when they have tape recordings of employees involved in this.”
Instead of indictments, U.S. prosecutors used deferred prosecutions in which criminal charges are set aside in exchange for an agreement to pay fines and change behavior.
The complaint describes Cruz’s discovery in 2009 of numerous fraudulent accounts belonging to companies with non-existent addresses. One individual didn’t know an account was maintained in her name, Cruz claims.
The suit was filed in the Eastern District of New York by Grosso and Associates in Washington, D.C., and Nicholas J. Damado in Huntington, N.Y.
Cruz said he hopes it will lead to criminal prosecutions.
“The government states it has had no evidence to prosecute executives,” Cruz told WND. “But I have tape recordings of the employees talking about all the fraud they’re doing.”
He explained that along with internal bank documents, he gave federal law enforcement authorities recordings of lower management stating their superiors were instructing them to cover up fraud.
The recordings, Cruz said, also provide evidence his bosses sought to terminate him “because I found fraud, and they needed to cover it up, and they needed to get rid of me.”
Cruz said the federal government, for its part, is “afraid to shut down a bank that is ‘too big to fail.'”
“What is too big to fail?” he asked. “If you are too big to fail, then you’re too big to be open.”
HSBC, he said, should be divided up so some sections can be shut down.
As WND reported, after Cruz gave his evidence to authorities in 2009, he was not contacted until the allegations were first exposed by WND earlier this year.
Cruz met with special agents with the IRS criminal division in April and handed over a computer disc with copies of his internal documents. The agents, according to Cruz, were overwhelmed with the volume and detail of the information, calling it “mind-boggling.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/whistleblower-sues-bank-giant-for-10-million/#srzZ75lqj8Igbvc1.99