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How TD Bank got caught up in the global drug war, helping to launder hundreds of millions of dollars
(www.theglobeandmail.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In January, 2021, American law enforcement agencies surveilled a suspicious box truck and a Lexus SUV through the streets of Queens, N.Y. Their hunch was that a criminal ring was out to launder drug money.
“I regret that there were serious instances where the Bank’s AML program fell short and did not effectively monitor, detect, report or respond,” TD’s chief executive officer Bharat Masrani said in a statement Friday.
For months, investors and analysts have wondered if U.S. authorities were concerned about multiple AML breaches at TD over a long period of time, which might soften the financial blow, or if there was a new, major event that would result in much tougher enforcement.
TD, then, is in the centre of a geopolitical firestorm that spans China, which often supplies the chemicals for narcotics, Mexico, which manufactures the drugs and moves them into the U.S., and Russia, whose spies are reportedly deeply embedded in Mexican criminal groups.
Criminal rings now use “a wide range of innovative methods that avoid international wire transfers and pose particular obstacles for law enforcement,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., warned in a March U.S. Senate hearing.
In one instance, law enforcement found one of the ring’s members carrying multiple heavy bags up to the teller window at an unnamed financial institution, after which Mr. Sze approached and took numerous bundled stacks of U.S. currency out and placed them on the counter to be processed.
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