You might also be thinking of HSBC [1] or Wachovia [2] or possibly one of several Australian banks [3] or maybe this European bank [4] or this one [5], or indeed Credit Suisse.

The thing to know about money laundering is that the rules are basically set by the USA, and after the 9/11 attacks the US made money laundering a strict liability crime. It means you can be found guilty of it even if you didn't know you were doing it, made extensive efforts to ensure you didn't and even if the actual violations were made by someone else not yourself. And money laundering is defined as moving money on the behalf of criminals, or not doing enough to realize you were doing so. How much is doing enough? That's subjective, up to the regulators and they are allowed to do things like tell you you're doing enough then later change their mind and prosecute you for it.

Because it's impossible to successfully comply with such a moving target, every large bank in the world is constantly being fined for AML violations. It doesn't mean much about any specific bank to say it's been fined for that. If it was possible to actually comply, there'd be no crime that involved any financial component any more i.e. no drug trade or fraud, because the banks would always detect it, suspend the accounts, report the owners and seize the money.

Clearly these crimes do still exist because banks don't have enough information to reliably beat all criminals. They don't have police powers, so the most they can do is rely on heuristics. It's especially tough in parts of the world where cartels may have unlimited budgets to beat your systems, corrupt your employees, corrupt government employees or threaten your staff with having their arms chopped off if they don't help out. AML regulations don't recognize these problems as legitimate however, meaning you as a banker can be prosecuted and jailed for up to 20 years because someone, somewhere else in your organization, wasn't suspicious enough about some activity and report it in a timely manner.

That's why it feels like banks are always "getting away with it". Governments, even the US government, can't actually enforce the laws as written because if they did then the entire financial industry would collapse overnight from mass staff exodus. This was the very real risk that led to HSBC being fined rather than directly prosecuting the staff. There was apparently a big fight inside the US Gov about this between the Justice Dept and the Treasury, with (I think) the former wanting prosecutions and the latter pushing for no prosecutions. The Treasury knew that prosecutions could succeed and if they did, there'd be a very different and much worse kind of bank run.

To me, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect bankers to achieve what the world's police forces and intelligence agencies never could. But the public doesn't really understand these dynamics. Whenever they read about banks laundering money, they think it's bankers who are knowingly taking part in organized crime and so demand punitive action. Governments can then blame the banks for crime whilst simultaneously taking some billions of dollars from them for the general budget. In the short term it's a win for them. The true cost is somewhat subtle and long term, in things like innocent people being unable to get bank accounts, or finding it very difficult, and a general feeling of society being rigged in favor of the bankers who never seem to be punished for their claimed crimes. The fix would be a mix of changes to AML rules and the PATRIOT Act, transforming the system into something a lot more mechanical and objective. It might make some crime a bit easier, but that can be counterbalanced by e.g. increased funding to the police.

[1] https://www.learnsignal.com/blog/hsbc-money-laundering/#:~:t....

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...

[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5bkyq/drug-cartels-used-aus...

[4] https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/08/news/rabobank-mexico-drug-m...

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-fincen-files-sh...