Money laundering in the spin cycle

Of course, USA Today headlines it “Mexico asks for help…”.  Nah, Mexico wants to know where their citizens — including those in the (ahem) Andean agricultural transport industry — are hiding their assets:

… Mexico is seeking financial data from foreign banks where its citizens are suspected of hiding assets.

But the accounts being targeted aren’t in Switzerland or other historic tax havens. They’re in the U.S.

Mexico Secretary of Finance Agustin Carstens outlined the strategy in a Feb. 9 letter seeking help for the tax crackdown from U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. He wrote that some Mexicans have stashed funds in U.S. banks, knowing the assets won’t be disclosed back home.

Carstens. ..  wrote, “We simply are allowing both the tax avoiders and the criminals to move their money untaxed and benefit from it.”

He asked Geithner to authorize data exchanges on interest banks in one country pay to residents of the other — a system the U.S. and Mexico have with Canada.

Such a mechanism would “provide us with a powerful tool to detect, prevent and combat tax evasion, money laundering, terrorist financing, drug trafficking and organized crime,” Carstens wrote.

The Treasury Department said it had answered the request but wouldn’t provide details…

In a related note, Inca Kola picked up on something that looks shadier and shadier, fallout from an already shady operation:

A security director for the shuttered Stanford Financial Group, and a deputy, were indicted for their alleged role in obstructing the probe of group’s alleged $7 billion fraud, court documents unsealed on Thursday showed.

That´s not the interesting part.  The security director in question is Tom Raffanello:

… who before joining Stanford was chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Miami office, was taken into a Fort Lauderdale federal courtroom in shackles on Friday to face charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and destroying records.

Raffanello served as the global security chief for Stanford Financial Group (SFG), the Texas-based banking company accused in an alleged $7 billion Ponzi scheme that bilked investors who bought certificates of deposit from Stanford’s Caribbean bank.

Stanford is widely assumed “on the street” (in biz-speak) to have been laundering money for the narcotics industry, and Raffanello is the second high-level D.E.A. former official indicted in Florida on felony charges this week.

Stay tuned.