 "Former federal prosecutors said pursuing Meng Wanzhou, 46, for alleged bank fraud proved to be a better line of attack than trying to build a case on national security grounds. Photo: Bloomberg")
It was a message that federal authorities had grown accustomed to hearing: The global bank HSBC belatedly realised it had been processing financial transactions that might have run afoul of American law.
HSBC had repeatedly been penalised for helping clients launder money. Now, though, there was a different problem. From 2009 to 2014, HSBC helped the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei move money in Iran, in breach of United States sanctions. This time, the bank said, it had a good excuse: Huawei, and one of its top executives, tricked HSBC into handling the business.
This month, the matter exploded into an international incident
