The more that comes to light about the nefarious activities of the Big four banks, the more extraordinary it is that these banks (a) demand a return to business as usual (which of course caused the financial crash in the first place), (b) continue to fight back against any reforms of a dysfunctional finance sector, feeble though these measures are, (c) show not a scintilla of remorse or apology for the decade of disaster they’ve imposed on ordinary people and the economy as a whole (remember Bob Diamond’s infamous comment “It’s time to move on” as though nothing had happened), and (d) have never been held to account by prosecutions of the chief executives, finance directors and other executives responsible. This is all the more staggering when what has now been revealed is the enormous extent to which all 4 banks not only indulged in, but actively promoted, tax evasion/avoidance on an industrial scale. Barclays has 385 subsidiary companies in tax havens (36% of all its subsidiaries), HSBC has 550, Lloyds has 290, and RBS has 404! Continue reading
Tagged with HSBC
HSBC chairman admits bank too big to manage, so shrink it till it can be managed
Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC, put his finger on it when under scrutiny by the Treasury Select Committee last week: “I don’t feel that proximate to what was happening in the private bank (at Geneva)”. He felt ‘very ashamed’, but not enough to forfeit past bonus payments in response.
He was finance director when HSBC took over the Swiss bank subsidiary but tried to wash his hands of any responsibility by blaming the scandal of the local managers in Geneva. He argued that secrecy surrounding Swiss banking made it hard to have a direct line of sight of what was happening at the bank. So what is the point of having board directors in London supposedly governing the whole HSBC enterprise if they can’t prevent, have no knowledge of, major corruption at a foreign subsidiary? Even when the horrors of what went on at the Swiss bank are fully pointed out, he makes no apology about his own failings, but merely passes the buck. Continue reading
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This election should be about ridding Britain of the stench of corruption
It is incredible how the reports of corruption in Britain are now going from bad to worse almost every single day. HSBC’s original lame excuse for the massive tax evasion engineered by its Swiss bank in Geneva was that it was previously run on a ‘federated’ basis so that central controls were much looser. Yet we now find that the HSBC chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, was himself engaging in exactly this tax dodging for his own personal benefit from his own bank, holding £5m in a Swiss account and having his huge bonuses paid through an anonymous company registered in Panama. What adds insult to injury is that instead of being forced to stand down for deliberately profiting from the financial malpractice he was supposed to be regulating and closing down, he is now getting a total remuneration package of some £7.5m as HSBC announces £13bn profits for 2014. Continue reading
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Peter Oborne and the Tory crisis – unfit to run a newspaper, let alone a country
Good on Peter Oborne. Good on him for telling the Barclay Brothers to stick their job. Regular paid writing gigs are hard to come by for journos, so to spurn what is one of the cushiest jobs on Fleet Street for a matter of principle shows him to be a writer with value and integrity, however much regular readers and me disagree with Oborne’s politics.
There are some fascinating parallels between the pen portrait he draws of life at The Telegraph and the sorry state the Conservative Party find themselves in. As I’ve argued previously, the Tories have become dislocated from their core business support and now represent the most backward and socially useless sections of British capital, along with a still hefty but sure-to-dwindle residual support. Continue reading
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Why isn’t HSBC being prosecuted?
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
