If you listened to yesterday’s ‘Quarter with Kanga’ (if not, go to our You Tube channel, where you will find all our lives) you must know that we ventured to comment press articles arguing that for almost ten years (!!!) Polish banks have been looking closely into how international companies launder money with impunity through the banks’ infrastructure.
What did the illpractice look like? They used a method called mirror trading, i.e. parallel transactions. In short, it is a way of transferring value in which a person or entity buys securities in one place and sells them in another.
The practice is defined as illegal and one can only guess that by allowing for such operations banks were counting on the fact that profits from acting (or rather not acting, since this seems to be a more accurate name for watching the criminal proceedings idly) will allow the banks to bounce back from the financial pit they were at in the years of crisis.
Are we suprised? Not really. Experience in functioning withing the banking structures has taught us not to put too much hope in the rule of law and rationality. Are we disgusted? Very much so! The same banks which – as media report – joyfully benefit from participating in the criminal activities have had the nerve over the recent months to terminate contracts to cryptocurrency trading companies motivating their decisions – NOTE! – with suspicious cryptocurrency operations.
What is absurd is the fact that such highly respected institutions as NBP and KNF are watching all of this, focusing a bit too much on warning people against cryptocurrencies instead of simply learning about them and not watching closely enough the activities of financial institutions under their supervision.
