A high-ranking Justice Department official on December 11 defended the government’s decision not to seek criminal charges against HSBC Holdings PLC for laundering money for drug traffickers and pariah states.
The government’s deferred prosecution agreement with the bank constitutes a “sword of Damocles right over HSBC,” assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said during a news conference in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s a fiction to suggest this is not a robust result,” he continued, and a “disservice” to view the agreement as suggesting “anyone was getting a pass here.”
