‘Support whistleblowers’

PUTRAJAYA: When ex-policeman turned bank anti-money laundering officer Martin Woods found out his employer, one of the biggest banks in the United States, was helping Mexican drug lords to launder billions of US Dollars – his bosses expected him to “shut up”.

But Woods, born in “strong-minded” Liverpool, England, who was driven to law enforcement after seeing the horrible effects of drugs, could not take that sitting down.

“What was the alternative? Do I turn my face away like everyone else did?

“Just live off the proceeds of drug trafficking, go to the ATM and take out money covered in blood?” he said at the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) here.

The 51-year-old ended up whistleblowing to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 2007.

His stand against corruption led to the US Justice Department charging the bank with the largest Bank Secrecy Act violation in the country’s history and compelled it to pay US$160mil (RM680mil) in 2010.

The bank no longer exists in name, after being bought over by a finance services company.

Woods, now the head of financial crime at Thomson Reuters, joined the police at 17 where he worked in drug enforcement and then anti-money laundering investigations for the London Metropolitan Police.

He left after nearly two decades with the force and worked in anti-money laundering units in several banks before his gig as the head of that department in the said bank in 2005.

It wasn’t long before Woods found something fishy in his bank. Suspicious transactions related to the Mexican cross border currency exchange Casa de Cambios (CDC) and large summed traveller’s checks with sequential numbers with little to no identification details on them, were flowing through the said bank.

Woods issued a series of suspicious activity reports (SAR) to try and block the transactions. Instead, he said he was reprimanded and intimidated by his bank.

Woods struggled with illness and psychiatric treatment over a year before filing a civil suit against the bank.

He then made the decision to attend a public event in Scotland Yard where he struck up a conversation with a DEA agent and told of what was happening in the bank.

“A couple of months later he called and asked if I could fly to Miami to present at a hearing what was going on at the bank,” he said.

The DEA began looking into Woods’ SAR’s and discovered that about US$13bil (RM55bil) in drug money was funnelled through the Mexican CDC into the bank’s accounts and were linked to purchases of jets used to traffic drugs.

US Federal prosecutors filed charges against the bank in 2009 and Woods was finally vindicated.

He contends, like himself, world leaders were not doing enough to protect whistleblowers.

Woods said the only thing people can do for whistleblowers was to pile public pressure on leaders and politicians to pardon them.