Hillary Helped UBS—and Then the Bank Funneled Millions to the Clintons

[Octafish]

11. HSBC also stepped up to protect the right of US citizens to offshore their loot, er, fortunes.

US government faces pressure after biggest leak in banking history

Questions for Department of Justice and IRS after disclosure of leak revealing HSBC’s private Swiss bank helped clients to conceal undeclared ‘black’ accounts

The US government will come under intense pressure this week to explain what action it took after receiving a massive cache of leaked data that revealed how the Swiss banking arm of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank, helped wealthy customers conceal billions of dollars of assets.

The leaked files, which reveal how HSBC advised some clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, were obtained through an international collaboration of news outlets, including the Guardian, the French daily Le Monde, CBS 60 Minutes and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The files reveal how HSBC’s Swiss private bank colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from domestic tax authorities across the world and provided services to international criminals and other high-risk individuals.

The disclosure amounts to one of the biggest banking leaks in history, shedding light on some 30,000 accounts holding almost $120bn (£78bn) of assets. Of those, around 2,900 clients were connected to the US, providing the IRS with a trail of evidence of potential American taxpayers who may have been hiding assets in Geneva.

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HSBC deal ‘fundamentally wrong’

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren famously labelled the HSBC deal “fundamentally wrong”. “HSBC paid a fine, but no individual went to trial, no individual was banned from banking and there was no hearing to consider shutting down HSBC’s actives in the US,” Warren said at a Senate committee hearing in 2013. “How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?”

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http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/08/us-government-biggest-leak-banking-history-questions-irs-taxes