Lawmakers plans to hold a hearing on the report Tuesday morning, to question senior executives from the London-based bank.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said London-based HSBC (HBC) failed to review thousands of suspicious transactions over the past decade.According to the report in 2007 and 2008, HSBC’s Mexico unit shipped $7 billion in cash to the bank’s U.S. affiliate, a volume of shipments that law enforcement officials said could reach that size “only if they included illegal drug proceeds,” bloomberg reports.HSBC Mexico had a number of high-profile clients linked to drug trafficking, the report says, as well as “a huge backlog of accounts marked for closure due to suspicious activity, but whose closures were delayed.”

In addition, some HSBC bank affiliates bypassed US government bans against financial transactions with Iran and other countries, according to the report.

And HSBC’s US affiliate provided money and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh believed to have links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, the report said.

“We will acknowledge that, in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect,” Robert Sherman, an HSBC spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. “We will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong.”

“Drug dependence is a disorder that can be treated effectively but, unfortunately, the large majority of persons who need it do not have access to treatment,” the Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Department for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Dr. Shekhar Saxena, said in a news release announcing the launch of the information system.

“The data presented in the new system illustrate the huge gaps that still exist in the area of drug dependence treatment. But more and more countries realize the benefits of treatment for drug and alcohol dependence, not only for the individuals themselves, but also for the society and the economy,” he added.

According to WHO, until now, drug dependence has not been recognized as a health problem in many countries and stigma and discrimination associated with drug dependence have been major barriers to appropriate treatment. For the health agency, drug dependence is a disorder that can be treated effectively with low-cost medicines and standardized psychological therapies.

With its launch coinciding with the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, the WHO Global Health Observatory Database – Resources for the Prevention and Treatment of Substance Use Disorders estimates that, worldwide, about 230 million adults aged 15-64 – or five per cent of the world’s adult population – used an illicit drug at least once in 2010, including about 27 million people with severe drug problems.

The global information system provides data for each of the assessed countries, such as funding, staff and services, and thereby complements already available information on the scope and associated harms of substance use disorders. The country profiles included in the new system cover 88 per cent of the world’s population.

“The availability of drug dependence treatment lags well behind treatment and care offered for other diseases according to our data,” said the Coordinator of WHO’s Management of Substance Use team, Dr. Vladimir Poznyak.

As an example, he said that only 45 per cent of the assessed countries are able to provide essential medicines to treat the dependence on heroin and other opiates, and in almost half of the countries where treatment is available, not more than one in five people with drug use disorders benefits from the services.

“A quarter of the countries which identify opiates as the main drug problem do not offer the range of medications recommended by WHO,” he added.

WHO has been working closely with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) since 2009 to increase the access to treatment for people with drug use disorders. The health agency notes that the understanding that drug abuse, at its core, is a public health issue has increased in recent years – however, only 82 countries offer special health services to people with drug use disorders.