The differential treatment between those low-paid workers who fraudulently claim benefits and those top bank executives who launder hundreds of millions of pounds for drug cartels or pariah states tells you all you need to know about the class basis of justice in the UK. A person claiming benefits while working can get up to a year in prison with all the shame involved, yet the bank director responsible for HSBC Mexico, which handled a colossal $376bn of suspect money for the US bank Wachovia, gets off scot-free and is even, in flagrant disregard for the law, promoted to become head of HSBC global retail on a multi-million dollar salary. There could not be a more blatant example of one law for the poor and quite another one for the rich. Continue reading
Tagged with Banking
HSBC is out of control and should be broken up
The lesson of the HSBC debacle is not merely that tax evaders must be hunted down much more relentlessly, but that in its present form it’s ungovernable. It’s no good saying HSBC was run in a ‘federated way’, but now management has been tightened up (is anybody really taken in by that anyway?).
We were told that in 2012 when the HSBC Mexican bank was found guilty of money laundering for pariah states, drug cartels and big mafia crime syndicates, but 3 years later the same charges have erupted elsewhere. A senior US Department of Justice official got it right when he said that HSBC’s culture was “pervasively polluted”. The truth is that HSBC, once a cautious and conservative organisation, was derailed in the late 1990s by its chairman Sir John Bond into a huge overseas buying spree to satisfy the board’s ambition to turn it into a global empire. Any idea of serving the interests of Britain was pushed to the margins and the empire-building avarice of Bond took over and went wild. Continue reading
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With ballooning debt and oversized banks, another financial crash isn’t far off
In election Britain this last week has been consumed with business and finance, mainly the hedge funds, lambasting Labour for being ‘anti-business’, as though massive indulgence in tax avoidance and continued insistence on de-regulation of finance were the conditional requirements of a successful global economy. Actually they are the forerunners of the next financial collapse which may be sooner than many people anticipate. Consider the evidence. Continue reading
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Banks ‘too big to fail’ in the credit crunch are now far bigger
There several dangers that face the world economyat the start of this New Year – further outbreaks of violence both within and outside the Middle East, destabilisation caused by the abrupt halving or more of the oil price, the slow-down of world growth (China), deflation and possible breakdown in the Eurozone, and another banking crisis.
Six years after the financial breakdown in 2008-9 it is therefore disturbing to see the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) seeking public acclaim for the large increase in financial penalties it has imposed on miscreant banks, as though this has changed the culture of hubris that has infected the major banks over the last decade or more. Continue reading
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Big accountancy firms’ corrupt fiddles for the banks must be stopped
The evidence piles up that the private sector auditors of banks have manifestly failed in their duties. All the major banks received unqualified audit opinions from Deloitte & Touche, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, and Ernst & Young. Private sector auditors have a history of silence and are immersed in too many conflicts of interest.
The evidence is their silence at Barings and Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), as well as at other debacles. Accounting standards for banks are set by the International Accounting Standards Board, but astonishingly this is a private limited company in London funded by the Big 4 accounting firms who audit the banks and major corporations – a nice cushy cartel whereby the accountancy companies control by their funding the body that is supposed objectively to set their standards. The rules have enabled banks to publish opaque annual accounts, and vast amounts of assets and liabilities have not been shown on their balance sheets. Continue reading
