The one person facing criminal charges over HSBC is the whistleblower

[Ichingcarpenter]

It is, I think, widely agreed that it is a scandal that fewer prosecutions have resulted from the HSBC leaks than anyone could reasonably have expected. But as my friend and co-author Prof Ronen Palan has pointed out in a calm analysis on The Conversation web site, there is one person facing prosecution:

Last but not least, as in previous cases of such leaks, the person most likely to suffer from the leak is the whistleblower himself. Hervé Falciani, the former HSBC systems engineer who revealed the information. He has been on the run from Swiss authorities since breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws and is living under protection.

So, just as Antoine Deltour is now being prosecuted in Luxembourg at the behest of PWC so is the HSBC whistleblower having to live a life under threat.

If there’s a lesson that comes out of this it is that a person revealing tax abuse has to be offered immunity from prosecution in international law. Justice demands it. In these cases, quite literally tax justice demands it.

- See more at: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2015/02/11/the-one-person-facing-criminal-charges-over-hsbc-is-the-man-we-have-to-thank/#sthash.FSs0TCKw.dpuf


HSBC’s Swiss tax scandal is part of a global pattern of avoidance


Fifth, as with the case of the tax scandal before this one, the Luxembourg files, an important political figure has been associated with these revelations by the media. Then, it was the current president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker who was prime minister and finance minister when dozens of multinational corporations were setting up tax evasion structures in Luxembourg.

Now, Conservative peer Stephen Green is in the firing line. As the man in charge of the bank at the time, he has been publicly criticised for either knowingly allowing this to take place or simply not knowing what was going on. Either way, Europe’s political class is strongly implicated by the series of recent leaks – either as consumers of the banking sector’s tax services or as the cheerleaders of these practices.

Last but not least, as in previous cases of such leaks, the person most likely to suffer from the leak is the whistleblower himself. Hervé Falciani, the former HSBC systems engineer who revealed the information. He has been on the run from Swiss authorities since breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws and is living under protection.


http://theconversation.com/hsbcs-swiss-tax-scandal-is-part-of-a-global-pattern-of-avoidance-37437

[Baitball Blogger]

1. I spoke to someone who works for HSBC.

They think this is old news. This happened in 2007 when everyone was doing it, they claim.

Which just goes to show you, justice delayed, is justice denied.

[jwirr]

2. Of course.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. HSBC files show Tories raised over £5m from HSBC Swiss account holders

Conservative donors, peers and a high profile MP are listed among the wealthy who legally held accounts in Switzerland with HSBC’s private bank, for a wide variety of reasons.

Their ranks include Zac Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, plus his brother the financier Ben Goldsmith, and a Swiss resident, German-born automotive heir Georg von Opel, who has donated six-figure sums in the past two years.

Peers named in the HSBC files include Lord Sterling of Plaistow, the P&O shipping and ports entrepreneur who was ennobled by Margaret Thatcher, and Lord Fink, who was a party treasurer under David Cameron and has given £3m to the Conservatives.

Zac Goldsmith has, with his brother Ben and their mother Lady Annabel, donated over £500,000 in cash and in kind to the Conservatives.


http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/11/hsbc-files-show-tories-raised-over-5m-from-hsbc-swiss-account-holders

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. Clinton Foundation Received Up To $81m From Clients Of Controversial HSBC Bank

Clinton Foundation Received Up To $81m From Clients Of Controversial HSBC Bank - Guardian



The charitable foundation run by Hillary Clinton and her family has received as much as $81m from wealthy international donors who were clients of HSBC’s controversial Swiss bank. Leaked files from HSBC’s Swiss banking division reveal the identities of seven donors to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation with accounts in Geneva.

They include Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate and one of the foundation’s biggest financial backers, and Richard Caring, the British retail magnate who, the bank’s internal records show, used his tax-free Geneva account to transfer $1m into the New York-based foundation.



More: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/10/hillary-clinton-foundation-donors-hsbc-swiss-bank

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. HSBC Got Away With Buying Cocaine Plane Whil

HSBC Got Away With Buying Cocaine Plane - DailyBeast

HSBC Got Away With Buying Cocaine Plane
While the Justice Department was busy prosecuting American HSBC customers for tax evasion, it has taken no action against the bank for nearly five years.



The U.S. Justice Department is shocked, simply shocked by recent press reports that the megabank HSBC aided Americans in evading taxes. But, here is what really is shocking: DOJ has known about the tax-evasion allegations for nearly five years.

And DOJ took no action against HSBC even as it prosecuted bank customers for their part in the same schemes.

This rank unfairness by the folks at the place called Justice was compounded three years ago after the feds caught HSBC laundering $881 million in drug cartel money and actively concealing illegal dealings with Iran and North Korea. A money-laundering investigation as big as the bank itself ended with a deferred prosecution agreement that allowed HSBC to escape criminal charges and suffer only a fine.

This while the DOJ was jailing non-bankers by the dozen for laundering drug money, including cash from the Sinaloa cartel, which had been a prime HSBC co-conspirator. Two men at a car dealership who took cartel cash for automobiles got serious prison time.

HSBC got a pass on helping the Sinaloa bunch acquire an airplane that was used to smuggle drugs by the ton.

In the meantime, the same shameful principle of letting the big bank skate and going after the little guy was at work in the tax-evasion cases. DOJ aggressively prosecuted private citizens such as a New Jersey businessman who was lured into a tax scheme by HSBC and a Virginia doctor who sought to avoid paying taxes on money his deceased mother had stashed in a secret HSBC account in Switzerland.

But neither the bank nor the particular bankers were ever charged. And, as dictated by DOJ policy on uncharged parties, HSBC and its executives were never so much as named in court papers and proceedings.

Even as the doctor, Andrew Silva, pleaded guilty to tax evasion in in June 2010, the government termed HSBC only as “the International Bank.”

“The reason that the government did not disclose the name of the banker, the bank… in our proceedings is because I don’t think we, as the government, are supposed to do that,” the prosecutor told the judge during the sentencing in Alexandria federal court. “We have no objection, and there is no reason why the defendant cannot say who it is, it is not a secret, but I think we are just not, we, the government, are not supposed to put it in pleadings.”

<snip>

More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/11/if-hsbc-were-a-person-it-d-be-in-jail.html#

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. HSBC Documents Reveal Criminal Conspiracy of Banks and Governments

On Sunday, international news outlets the Guardian and Le Monde, working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), published articles based on their analysis of leaked files showing that the Swiss private banking arm of HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, functioned for years as a tax evasion and money laundering firm.

The company ran a branch that gave out “bricks” of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in foreign denominations and provided its wealthy clientele with advice on how to commit tax fraud, according to the reports.

These facts have for years been been in the possession of international financial regulators and governments throughout the world—including those of Britain, France and the United States—which systematically covered them up. Neither the bank, nor its executives, nor any of the clients that utilized its tax dodging services have been criminally prosecuted.

No one should believe that HSBC is an aberration; there is no doubt that similar practices are carried out by all major international financial institutions. The HSBC files have unearthed a cesspool of corruption, criminality, bribery and collusion that pervades the entire capitalist system and the governments that defend it.

The HSBC revelations are only the latest in a series of scandals involving virtually every major financial institution. These have included the selling of fraudulent subprime mortgage-backed securities, illegal foreclosures, commodities fraud and the manipulation of LIBOR and international foreign exchange benchmarks.

HSBC was one of the institutions whose greed and lawlessness plunged the world into a crisis in 2008 from which it has never recovered, cost millions of people their jobs and launched a wave of austerity all over the world involving the slashing of workers wages’ and social benefits.


Perhaps the biggest cover-up has been carried out in the United States, where in 2012 the Justice Department agreed to a $1.2 billion “deferred prosecution” settlement with HSBC on charges of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels, never mentioning the fact that the US government had evidence the bank helped its clients evade taxes.

One of the leading architects of the settlement with HSBC, Loretta Lynch, at that time the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, is now the Obama administration’s nominee to replace Eric Holder as attorney general. The Reverend Lord Stephen Green, HSBC’s chief executive during the period covered by the files, was subsequently appointed the UK’s minister of state for trade and investment.

The trail of dirty money reaches as high as former US President Bill Clinton. British business tycoon Richard Caring, who once picked up more than five million Swiss francs in cash from the bank, donated $1 million to Clinton’s foundation from his Swiss bank account.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/hsbc-documents-reveal-criminal-conspiracy-of-banks-and-governments/5430685

[Ichingcarpenter]

10. Lawyer moved Halliburton subsidiary bribes through secret Swiss HSBC accounts

A network of secretive banks and offshore tax havens was used to funnel $182 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in exchange for $6 billion in engineering and construction work for an international consortium of companies that included a then Halliburton subsidiary.

In 2010 Nigeria indicted former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who was CEO of Halliburton before he was elected, only to later clear him when Halliburton worked out a $35 million settlement.

Leaked records from HSBC, a huge global bank based in London, reveal new details about the bank’s role as a conduit for the bribes — and new details about how British lawyer Jeffrey Tesler operated. The files, obtained by the French newspaper Le Monde and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity, show ties between Tesler and high-ranking Nigerians not previously named publicly in connection with the scandal, raising the possibility of renewed questions about Nigeria’s handling of the affair.


http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/10/16735/lawyer-moved-halliburton-subsidiary-bribes-through-secret-swiss-hsbc-accounts

[Orrex]

7. I wondered about this yesterday

http://www.democraticunderground.com/111664462#post4

[One_Life_To_Give]

8. Time for the progressive Guillotine Party?

[riderinthestorm]

9. K&R nt