Chris Blackhurst & Oliver Bullough on Too Big to Jail
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A special 5x15 event with Chris Blackhurst- an acclaimed writer, commentator, former editor of The Independent and author of Too Big To Jail (Macmillan)- in conversation with investigative reporter Oliver Bullough, author of Butler to the World and Moneyland.

El Chapo, the world’s number one drug baron, had a problem: he needed to launder the billions of dollars he netted from peddling drugs across the United States. Step forward, HSBC...

Too Big to Jail : Inside HSBC, the Mexican drug cartels and the greatest banking scandal of the century by Chris Blackhurst tells the shocking story of how the bank that likes to call itself ‘the world’s local bank’ came to the aid of one of the world's biggest drug cartels.

For years, HSBC via its Mexican subsidiary, acted as a giant laundromat for Chapo and his Sinaloa drugs cartel. In one visit, a Chapo henchman deposited $933,000, in cash; they also used specially made boxes that exactly fitted the cashiers’ windows; the gangsters routed their money via HSBC in the Cayman Islands - 60,000 accounts were opened, holding $1.2billion.

Warnings to the bank were ignored. The Americans wanted to prosecute HSBC bankers but incredibly, the UK government, in the shape of the Chancellor George Osborne, intervened, arguing this risked bringing down the bank and the entire financial system. In the end, in late 2012, HSBC received a fine, the largest in US history, of $1.9billion. But this amounted to just five weeks’ profits. The result, as with the crisis of 2008, was that no banker went to jail.

Too Big to Jail vividly and grippingly details this tale of appalling greed, hubris and utterly scandalous behaviour.

Chris Blackhurst is an award-winning journalist and commentator. He worked on investigations for The Sunday Times, at Westminster, and was City Editor of the Evening Standard and Editor of The Independent. He was hailed in the Guardian as “the outstanding story-getter of his generation”. His writing has appeared in many of the world’s leading titles. He is an accomplished broadcaster.

Oliver Bullough is a prize-winning journalist and author from Wales, who specialises in the former Soviet Union and corruption. His work appears in the Guardian, the New York Times, GQ magazine, Prospect and elsewhere, and he regularly appears on the BBC, Sky News, CNN and other media outlets. His books include Moneyland, about which John le Carré said: "If you want to know why international crooks and their eminently respectable financial advisors walk tall and only the little people pay taxes, this is the ideal book for you" and most recently Butler to the World.

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