The Financial Post reports in its Tuesday edition that presiding over the biggest scandal in TD Bank's 169-year history is not how Bharat Masrani expected to end his 10-year tenure as chief executive officer. Guest columnist John Turley-Ewart writes that the United States alleges TD facilitated money laundering by criminal drug gangs. Yet in the arc of TD Bank's history, Mr. Masrani will be remembered not just for undermining the bank's position with U.S. regulators, but also for stumbling on a larger project, one that began in the mid-1990s under Charles Baillie's leadership. Mr. Baillie initiated an aggressive growth strategy that included large acquisitions, buying Waterhouse Securities in 1996 to complement the TD Securities business. In 2000, Mr. Baillie struck a deal with Ed Clark, CEO of Canada Trust, to buy the London, Ont., trust company. Announced in February, 2022, the acquisition of First Horizon would have grown the Canadian bank's footprint across 12 states. U.S. regulators would have none of it, and eventually it was revealed that the lapses in anti-money-laundering controls were a big part of the problem. This growth-by-acquisition strategy caused TD to lose its historical operational effectiveness.