HSBC and Standard Chartered's Hong Kong shares dropped on Monday after some reports said that they and several other global banks moved large sums of allegedly illicit funds over nearly two decades despite red flags about the origins of the money.
BuzzFeed and other media reports were based on leaked Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by banks and other financial firms with the US Department of Treasury.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reported that the files contained information about more than $2 trillion worth of transactions between 1999 and 2017, which were flagged by internal compliance departments of financial institutions as suspicious.
Five global banks appeared most often in the documents - HSBC, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered and Bank of New York Mellon, the ICIJ reported.