I have an article on HSBC on the Guardian's Comment is Free site this afternoon. I frame the problem like this:
The HSBC story is one that a few years ago almost no one could have imagined. A major bank is alleged to have assisted fraud. The UK is supplied with evidence in more than 7,000 cases. Our tax authority is so slow to respond that some two years later, only one in six of those named have even been contacted. In the meantime it signs a deal with Switzerland in which it is said that the public interest is not served by prosecuting anyone involved. To date, no one has been prosecuted for specific issues relating to the disclosure. And HSBC's former chair, who was also the chair of the HSBC Swiss private bank that is alleged to have arranged the fraud, was ennobled by the Conservative party, become a minister of the state and now advises the archbishop of Canterbury. Alan Ayckbourn could not have created such a plot. But it happened.
And as I argue:
In that case, if we want to solve the problem of HSBC, we have to start at home. The City has to be brought to account. Its influence on public administration has to be reduced, or even eliminated. The revolving doors that saw the HMRC director who negotiated the Swiss tax deal then leave to go to HSBC have to be shut. And we must invest in law enforcement in terms of political support, sufficient people, enough cash and a willingness to create and enforce laws that will work.
For the rest, and how I get from my proposition to my argument, read here.
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And while people like Green, and the wealthy people who committed fraud with the connivance of the bank he was in charge of, are ledt off the hook, many of those lawfully in receipt of social security payments have been driven to suicide, an early death from stress or hunger, or had their lives made even more miserable by this government’s ‘reforms’ to the welfare state.
The same government that employed Green as a minister and gave him a peerage. Does anybody on the political right have any ethical values at all, or are they just a pack of psychopathic, vindictive hypocrites?
a naive question, Richard. If HSBC ‘left’ to Singapore, would we have to protect their depositers who live here? Or would that be down to Singapore? Or each country only protects its own citizens?
We would protect the deposit holders here
Compensation of depositors has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with the country in which the bank is licensed and ‘regulated’. So in the unlikley event HSBC ceased to be a British bank,regulated by the FCA, depositors (of whatever nationality) would surely no longer be covered by the UK scheme but by whatever scheme (if any) existing in Singapore (or wherever)?
But the UK bank would be UK regulated