Articles, News & Press > Whistleblowing can damage your health, says Wachovia Bank whistleblower Martin Woods
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Whistleblowing can damage your career, says Wachovia Bank whistleblower Martin Woods

By OffshoreAlert, February 10, 2010

 

Are banks genuinely interested in clamping down on money laundering or do they consider compliance to be a nuisance that stands in the way of profits? The experience of former Wachovia Bank compliance officer Martin Woods suggests the latter might be the case.

 

After Woods reported suspicious activity of alleged money laundering by a notorious Mexican drugs cartel to Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency, Wachovia turned on him instead of thanking him, he claims.

 

In a whistleblower suit fled with an employment tribunal in London, Woods claims that his bosses at Wachovia bullied and demoted him, withdrew his reports of other suspicious activities involving other clients and may even have tipped off the bad guys about his laundering suspicions.

 

According to an article in Barron's financial magazine, "Wachovia bosses fought him when he filed reports in October 2006 about suspicious traveler's checks originating from Mexican exchanges like the Casa de Cambio Puebla, which delivered business valued at hundreds of millions of dollars to Wachovia's Miami office. Wachovia compliance executives scolded him, Woods alleges, for nosing into the activities of the bank's American operations. A few months later, Woods noticed that the Mexican casas de cambio simultaneously stopped routing traveler's checks through London. He asked his American counterparts if they had seen a similar routing change. Instead of obtaining assistance, says Woods' court filing, he was confronted by Wachovia's Miami manager of Latin American banking, Carlos A. Perez, who asked why Woods had problems when traveler's checks were sent to London and problems when they weren't. Perez didn't respond to Barron's inquiries."

 

Woods' suspicions about the Mexican casas de cambio proved correct when, in May, 2007, the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized $11 million that Wachovia held in Miami bank accounts for Casa de Cambio Puebla and, later that year, Mexican authorities closed the exchange and arrested its executive, Pedro Alatorre Damy, on suspicion of money laundering, reported Barron's.

 

Although a Non-Disclosure Agreement prevents him from speaking publicly about his experiences at Wachovia, Woods will offer advice to bank compliance officers about what to do when confronted with evidence of illegal activity when he speaks at the 8th Annual OffshoreAlert Financial Due Diligence Conference, in association with Grant Thornton, which will be held at The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach in Florida on May 2-4, 2010. He will also talk about the emotional turmoil that he has gone through as a result of his whistleblowing.

 

The session is entitled 'Whistleblowing Damaged Our Careers: The Incredible Stories of Employees Who Blew The Whistle on Allen Stanford and Wachovia Bank'. Woods will be joined by Charles Rawl, a former Financial Advisor for Allen Stanford's Stanford Financial Group who blew the whistle on the group's activities that ultimately contributed to its collapse and the criminal prosecution of Allen Stanford for allegedly masterminding a $8 billion fraud.

 

Whistleblowing is one of the main themes of the 8th Annual OffshoreAlert Financial Due Diligence Conference. Apart from Woods and Rawl, Julius Baer-whistleblower Rudolf Elmer, in his first public appearance, will also be speaking, as will Washington, DC-based attorney Jack Blum, who represents Elmer and LGT Bank-whistleblower Heinrich Kieber, Eric Havian, an attorney with California-based law firm Phillips & Cohen, which specializes in whistleblower cases, and Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt of WikiLeaks.org, the go-to web-site for whistleblowers around the world.

 

Register Now to reserve your seat and attend this and 28 other unique sessions presented by industry experts from the world's top organizations.

 

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