British Banks in trouble.

British banks are facing a lot of heat the world over. The Libor scandal caught many of them manipulating the Libor short term interest rates which form the basis for valuing many transactions such as loans, derivative contracts and investments,  running into trillions of dollars. As of now only Barclays Bank has been fined around $455 million and this has led to the resignation of its CEO. In the US some of these British banks have been subpoenaed by US regulators on that Libor rate-fixing issue. The UK's fraud squad is taking a keen interest in the matter.

Standard Chartered Bank was recently fined $340 million in civil penalties by New York's Department of Financial Services (DFS) for hiding transactions worth $250 billion involving Iran. In my own opinion this is a huge figure considering other US regulators are yet engage with StanChart over the matter. This means the bank is most likely to be hit deep in their pockets. This is surprising on the part of StanChart considering that they initially refused having been processed such huge funds for Iran.

HSBC Bank, Europe's largest was fined $27.5 million by Mexican regulators over it's failure to comply with money-laundering regulations. The bank also took a lot of heat from the US Senate Banking Committee after they were accused of providing a conduit for "dug kingpins and rogue nations"

All of this points to low levels of trust and integrity which was one of the pinnacles of the British banking industry which made the City of London a cut above the rest. After all this disclosures you never know what new scandal is coming up next.