Lai See | HSBC pays big bonuses while admitting to money laundering

So HSBC paid 204 of its staff more than £1 million (HK$11.7 million) each in bonuses for the financial year just gone, we learned from its results yesterday.

This is after paying a penalty of US$1.92 billion to US regulatory authorities for laundering hundreds of millions of US dollars for the likes of Mexican drug cartels, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Russian gangsters, and helping countries such as Iran, Sudan and North Korea to evade sanctions.

But there are no criminal charges and nobody went to jail. Meanwhile, an individual was recently jailed for 21 months for laundering HK$1.2 million, and another got 10-and-a-half years for laundering HK$13.1 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to HSBC's crimes.

The US Department of Justice's statement last December said: "A four-count felony criminal information was filed … in federal court in the Eastern District of New York charging HSBC with willfully failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, willfully failing to conduct due diligence on its foreign correspondent affiliates … HSBC has waived federal indictment, agreed to the filing of the information, and has accepted responsibility for its criminal conduct and that of its employees."

For this it gets a fine and its chairman "apologises unreservedly". We will probably be accused of being facile but it does not seem right that a bank that has accepted responsibility for criminal behaviour on a massive scale gets off with a fine and an apology, and pays itself fat bonuses, while an individual found guilty is jailed.