In July, the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations produced a damning 334-page report that told a similar story.
In one email cited in the Senate committee's report, an HSBC executive pushed to reopen a part of the bank's business that had been closed to a Saudi Arabian bank with possible links to the Sept. 11 attacks.
At a hearing with the committee in July, the bank's head of group compliance broke from his prepared testimony to resign.
Henry Pontell, a criminologist who teaches at the University of California-Irvine, was underwhelmed by the $1.9 billion in fines against HSBC, given its $17 billion in profits last year.
"The notion that 'Oh, they paid a big fine; that will scare everyone else,' is nonsense," Pontell said. "Those individuals that did this, they didn't pay the $1.9 billion. The company did. And that's supposed to be an effective deterrent? A white-collar criminal, the biggest thing they fear is being put into prison."
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