HSBC bank scandal, Dick Cheney and corruption

Posted on February 20, 2015 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Cheney Charged With Bribery, Criminal Conspiracy. It says about itself:

2 December 2010

Nigerian officials said Thursday they will charge former US vice president Dick Cheney over a massive bribery scandal related to his time at the helm of oil services giant Halliburton.

Halliburton unit KBR pleaded guilty last year in the US to bribing Nigerian officials to the tune of 180 million dollars in return for six billion dollars worth of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) contracts in the oil hub Bonny Island.

Halliburton denied involvement in the offences dating back to 1995-2005, but a top company official and other staff were summoned by Nigeria’s anti-graft agency following raids last week on company offices in Lagos.

Prosecutor Godwin Obla said joint charges would be filed by Tuesday at a high court in the capital Abuja against Cheney, the former and current leadership of Halliburton, and the consortium they partnered with.

“As the CEO of Halliburton, he has the responsibility for acts that occurred during that period,” Obla told AFP, adding that Cheney would face conspiracy charges and an arrest warrent from Interpol would be sought.

A spokesman from the anti-graft agency, Femi Babafemi, confirmed the imminent charges, which follow an investigation into the construction of the LNG plant in southern Nigeria.

…

Companies in the TSKJ consortium involved in the plant included France’s Technip, Snamprogetti (formerly a subsidiary of a company owned by Italy’s Eni), Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), and Japan’s JGC.

KBR is a former subsidiary of Halliburton, where Cheney served as CEO before becoming vice president under George W. Bush following elections in 2000.

US authorities said last year that Halliburton and KBR had agreed to pay 177 million dollars to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States.

KBR agreed to pay a further 402 million dollars to settle criminal charges brought by the US Justice Department.

In October, a Nigerian court charged a personal aide to ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo in a related probe, and earlier this week, Nigeria’s anti-corruption authorities summoned a top local official from Halliburton.

Authorities also raided Halliburton’s office in Lagos last week and detained 10 people — eight Nigerians and two expatriates — who have since been released, as investigations continue.

Officials seized documents during the raid.

Nigeria is one of the world’s largest oil producers, but corruption remains deeply entrenched. Non-governmental organisations consistently rank the country as one of the world’s most corrupt.

Babafemi’s agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, was established to probe corruption allegations and has carried out a series of high-profile prosecutions.

Cheney, 69, one of most powerful and controversial US vice presidents, who was a driving force behind Bush’s “war on terror,” has a long history of heart trouble and was last operated on in August.

By Solomon Hughes in Britain:

Bribes and prejudice

Friday 20th February 2015

Contrary to popular belief, the best place to start looking for corrupt crony capitalism is not the developing world but London, says Solomon Hughes

Ten years ago I broke a story in Britain about how Halliburton — the firm formerly run by US vice-president Dick Cheney — was funnelling millions in bribe money for African politicians through an office on West Green Road, a shabby street in Tottenham, north London.

Halliburton led a consortium of companies that wanted to win contracts building a liquid natural gas plant on Bonny Island in Nigeria.

Halliburton and co were willing to spend millions bribing Nigerian politicians to win the work.

Its agent for the bribes was a lawyer called Jeffrey Tesler who worked from a dusty storefront office next to a north London newsagent.

The Halliburton consortium used Tesler to pay $182 million of bribes to win the deal up to 2003.

It was an interesting story because it showed Cheney had run a major corporation involved in corruption.

It showed that the vice-president who went on to drive the Iraq war and US torture programmes was always close to crime.

When the case broke, Nigeria actually indicted Cheney over the bribes, but dropped its attempt to prosecute him when Halliburton paid a multimillion-dollar settlement.

I found out about it because a French judge, Renaud van Ruymbeke, was investigating the case — one of the firms in the consortium was French.

Halliburton used its British subsidiary to run the scheme and the bribes went through a British lawyer.

The British government actually subsidised Halliburton on the Bonny Island scheme by offering “export credit” insurance as an “export promotion.”

But British authorities did little to break the corruption.

Peter Mandelson, who was minister in charge of export promotion, had opposed rules which said firms backed by government “export credits” must reveal the names of their agents as an anti-bribery measure.

It was blindingly obvious that “agents” were used by British firms to bribe developing world politicians, but Mandelson did not want to cause companies any inconvenience.

Tesler was finally extradited from Britain to the US, where he was tried and imprisoned in 2012. Even when the scandal was exposed, Britain left it up to another country to prosecute.

The reason I am returning to the story is because the recently leaked HSBC files reveal the bent bank’s Swiss branch held Tesler’s accounts.

The bribe money was shifted through HSBC Switzerland. The same bank also held the accounts for the companies that were used to transfer the bribes and the Nigerian politicians who took the bribes.

Not only that, but HSBC kept holding accounts for Tesler and his family years later.

HSBC could have known all about Tesler’s involvement with the bribe scandal in 2004 by simply reading my original story in the Independent. But it kept his accounts open until 2007 and beyond.

Tesler paid some of the bribes in cash.

In one case a million dollars was left in a pilot’s briefcase in a Lagos hotel. Another time a car with half a million dollars was left outside another hotel.

How Tesler got such huge sums of untraceable cash was a bit of a mystery — one that now seems to be solved.

HSBC Switzerland happily handed out millions of dollars in notes without question. The bank was, quite simply, involved in organised crime on a massive scale.

So a future vice-president runs the US firm that runs a multimillion-dollar bribe scheme.

The bribe money runs through a bank run by a future British trade minister. Sometimes people talk about “crony capitalism” and “endemic corruption” and sleazy politics when they talk about Nigeria.

But if you want to find crony corrupt capitalism, the best place to start is London.

HSBC should face UK criminal charges, says former public prosecutor. Lord Ken Macdonald QC says HMRC’s decision not to prosecute bank over Swiss revelations was ‘seriously legally flawed’: here.

Cameron’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ gaffe, like Bush

British Conservative party gets money from ‘Ms Swindler’

Posted on February 19, 2015 by petrel41

HSBC bank scandal, cartoon

From daily The Independent in Britain:

The typo that turned Tory donor Alisa Swidler into ‘Mrs Swindler’

American philanthropist gave party £65,000

Chris Green

Thursday 19 February 2015

It was, to say the least, an unfortunate typo. Diligently recording a generous donation to the Conservative Party by Alisa Swidler, a wealthy American philanthropist who has lived in the UK since 2002, someone at the Electoral Commission accidentally inserted a rogue “n”.

Perhaps fortunately for the Tories, the “Mrs Alisa Swindler” who was officially recorded as giving £65,000 to the party in December last year does not exist. The error, which the Conservatives insisted was not their fault, was hastily corrected by embarrassed officials tonight.

But the episode drew attention to the real donor, who is every bit as colourful as her misspelled name suggests. A regular contributor to the US lifestyle magazine Town & Country, Mrs Swidler describes herself on her blog as a “global humanitarian, philanthropist and mother of five”.

Entitled “The Buccaneer: A Busy New Yorker in London”, her internet diary provides an insight into her jet-setting lifestyle and is illustrated with numerous selfies of her with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Paul McCartney and Stephen Fry. It also mentions her encounters with David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Theresa May at various Conservative Party events.

“Collected husband and headed to Patek Philippe’s Bond Street boutique for a black tie dinner in a secret location. I kid you not! Holy cow, after in-store cocktails we were ferried away in a fleet of S-classes to Somerset House for a decadent dinner that started with duck egg parfait and ended with the best tarte tatin I’ve ever tasted,” reads one typical entry.

According to an online biography, over the past five years Mrs Swidler has done philanthropic work with the Clintons and Sir Richard Branson, and has served on the boards of Save the Children and the London homelessness charity Centrepoint, whose patron is Prince William.

MAY’S general election is a two-way battle between hedge-fund millionaires and millions of British workers, party donation figures published yesterday confirmed. Half of Tory donors for the last quarter of 2014 attended exclusive soirees with Prime Minister David Cameron, the stats showed. And hedge funds added another £2 million to their £55m vulture firm war chest: here.

A TORY election candidate has been suspended after allegedly using far-right extremists in a “jaw-dropping” plot to win votes by stirring up racial hatred, the party confirmed yesterday: here.

British Daily Telegraph’s links to iffy HSBC bank, new evidence

Posted on February 19, 2015 by petrel41

Cartoon about the HSBC scandal, by Chris Riddell in Britain

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Telegraph owners’ £250m HSBC loan raises fresh questions over coverage

Barclay brothers secured loan for loss-making company shortly before Telegraph reporters were allegedly discouraged from running articles critical of HSBC

Simon Bowers

Thursday 19 February 2015 18.51 GMT

The owners of the Daily Telegraph secured a £250m loan from HSBC for a struggling corner of their business empire shortly before the newspaper’s reporters were allegedly “discouraged” from running articles critical of the bank, the Guardian has learned.

The timing of the loan deal for Yodel, a loss-making parcel delivery firm owned by the Barclay brothers, raises fresh questions over the influence of commercial considerations on the Telegraph’s editorial coverage of HSBC.

The deal was completed on 14 December 2012, company documents show. The paper’s former chief political commentator Peter Oborne alleged this week that there was a sea-change in its editorial treatment of the bank from early 2013.

The documents show that Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay had to formally give a personal financial guarantee as additional security for the loan facility.

The paper’s editorial judgment over HSBC has been called into question this week by Oborne, who accused the paper of a “fraud on its readers” in an excoriating resignation statement.

Specifically, he claims that the Telegraph’s coverage of the bank changed abruptly just over two years ago. “From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged,” he said.

Yodel refinanced in mid-December 2012 with Europe’s biggest bank. As security, the bank took a charge over almost all the Yodel business – meaning the bank could take control of the parcel delivery group should the latter breach its borrowing commitments.

The new HSBC loan was used to repay previous borrowings from Lloyds Banking Group. The Yodel business made a loss of £112m for the year to 30 June 2013. Yodel filings show an outstanding amount of £242m was due to on the HSBC loan at the end of June 2013 and there are no filings since then suggesting the debt has been repaid.

Contacted by the Guardian, the Barclays family declined to comment on the loan, but a source close to the family dismissed suggestions that the Telegraph’s coverage could have been influenced by a loan from HSBC. The source also pointed out that the family’s businesses had borrowings with many other banks.

The Barclays camp believe a lot of inaccuracies have been written about them in recent days, though they have not expanded on what these are.

Oborne parted company with the Telegraph this week, going public, he said, in protest at its coverage of the HSBC scandal. The Telegraph veteran has called for an independent inquiry into the newspaper’s editorial guidelines because of what he sees as a lack of reporting on the HSBC affair. The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde and 50 other media outlets revealed how the bank’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, while circumventing domestic tax authorities.

Revelations about the controversial banking affairs of some of HSBC’s wealthiest clients have dominated headlines across the British media in recent weeks, but featured only fleetingly in the Telegraph, Oborne argues.

Yodels’ directors, who include Sir David Barclay’s sons Aiden and Howard, admit in the firm’s accounts that the parcel delivery trade is “a rapidly changing marketplace”. While that presented opportunities, there were too many suppliers in the industry, leading to “a high degree of competition”.

The accounts show the struggling business was able to qualify as a “going concern” for accounting purposes thanks to the willingness of its Jersey-based parent, another company in the Barclays’ investment empire called LW Corporation, to provide financial support. Companies in Jersey are not required to file accounts.

Earlier this week Oborne claimed that HSBC had suspended its advertising with the Telegraph after it ran an investigation in November 2012 based on leaked details of personal accounts held with HSBC in Jersey.

He also claims that reporters were ordered to destroy all emails, reports and documents related to the HSBC investigation. “This was the pivotal moment,” Oborne wrote.

He attributed the change to an effort to win back advertising. He said he had been told by an extremely well informed insider that HSBC’s advertising spend was extremely valuable. “Winning back the HSBC advertising account became an urgent priority,” Oborne said.

The UK’s largest commercial radio group, Global Radio, advised its stations, which include Classic FM, Capital and LBC, to drop the HSBC tax story on the morning the story broke for “editorial reasons”: here.

‘British Daily Telegraph cover-up of HSBC tax dodging scandal’

Posted on February 18, 2015 by petrel41

This video from the USA says about itself:

After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC Executives Avoid Jail?

13 December 2012

The banking giant HSBC has escaped indictment for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda. Despite evidence of wrongdoing, the U.S. Department of Justice has allowed the bank to avoid prosecution and pay a $1.9 billion fine. No top HSBC officials will face charges, either. We’re joined by Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, author of “Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.”

“You can do real time in jail in America for all kinds of ridiculous offenses,” Taibbi says. “Here we have a bank that laundered $800 million of drug money, and they can’t find a way to put anybody in jail for that. That sends an incredible message, not just to the financial sector but to everybody. It’s an obvious, clear double standard, where one set of people gets to break the rules as much as they want and another set of people can’t break any rules at all without going to jail.”

From daily The Independent in Britain, about the Daily Telegraph (also known as the Daily Torygraph, because of links to the Conservative party, now revealed to be involved in the HSBC bank scandal):

Peter Oborne resignation: Senior writer quits Telegraph dramatically over HSBC allegations

Columnist accuses paper’s owners of suppressing reportage for fear of losing advertising revenue

Adam Sherwin

Tuesday 17 February 2015

A senior writer at the Daily Telegraph has dramatically quit the newspaper after accusing its owners, the Barclay Brothers, of suppressing reports about the HSBC scandal out of fear of losing advertising revenue.

Peter Oborne, the paper’s chief political commentator and an award-winning author, announced his resignation in a blog on the openDemocracy website, in which he accused the Telegraph of committing a “fraud” on readers by burying reports on the HSBC tax scandal.

The journalist quoted a conversation with Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of Telegraph Media Group, whom he said freely admitted that advertising was allowed to affect editorial at the paper.

Referring to the phone-hacking scandal which hit Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, Oborne argued that democracy was being undermined by “shadowy” media executives “who determine what truths can and what truths can’t be conveyed” by news organisations.

Mr Oborne detailed a series of investigations about HSBC, and other financial scandals, which he said executives at the newspaper had closed down.

He declared that “democracy itself is in peril” if “major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue”.

The Telegraph called Mr Oborne’s attack “full of inaccuracy and innuendo”. The paper denied that its editorial judgements had ever been compromised by commercial imperatives.

Mr Oborne, an associate editor of The Spectator, who has presented investigations for Channel 4’s Dispatches, criticised his paper’s minimal coverage of the tax evasion scandal which engulfed HSBC and its Swiss banking arm.

He wrote: “You needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage: nothing on Monday, six slim paragraphs at the bottom left of page two on Tuesday, seven paragraphs deep in the business pages on Wednesday.

“The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers.”

The paper had made a sudden about turn after journalists pursued previous investigations into the bank. Mr Oborne wrote: “From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged. HSBC suspended its advertising with the Telegraph.

“Its account, I have been told by an extremely well informed insider, was extremely valuable. HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend’.

“HSBC today refused to comment when I asked whether the bank’s decision to stop advertising with the Telegraph was connected in any way with the paper’s investigation into the Jersey accounts.

“Winning back the HSBC advertising account became an urgent priority. It was eventually restored after approximately 12 months. Executives say that Murdoch MacLennan was determined not to allow any criticism of the international bank.”

As a result of a 2012 investigation into accounts held by HSBC in Jersey, he claimed: “Reporters were ordered to destroy all emails, reports and documents related to the HSBC investigation. I have now learnt, in a remarkable departure from normal practice, that at this stage lawyers for the Barclay brothers became closely involved.”

Mr Oborne, who wrote regular columns for the paper on what he perceived to be a moral corruption at the heart of Britain’s political culture, accused his bosses of appeasing Chinese interests by refusing to publish critical comment after China barred British MPs from a visit to Hong Kong.

He argued: “An editorial operation that is clearly influenced by advertising is classic appeasement. Once a very powerful body knows they can exert influence they know they can come back and threaten you. It totally changes the relationship you have with them.”

…

The best of Oborne

“The sackings continued. A little while later I met Mr MacLennan by chance in the queue of mourners outside Margaret Thatcher’s funeral and once again urged him not to take Telegraph readers for granted. He replied: “You don’t know what you are fucking talking about.”

With the collapse in standards has come a most sinister development. It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed.

“I was resigning as a matter of conscience. Mr MacLennan agreed that advertising was allowed to affect editorial, but was unapologetic, saying that “it was not as bad as all that” and adding that there was a long history of this sort of thing at the Telegraph.

“The past few years have seen the rise of shadowy executives who determine what truths can and what truths can’t be conveyed across the mainstream media. The criminality of News International newspapers during the phone hacking years was a particularly grotesque example of this wholly malign phenomenon.”

HSBC banking scandal and the British government

Posted on February 12, 2015 by petrel41

This video from Britain says about itself:

Who’s F*cking Us Over – HSBC Or Immigrants? Russell Brand The Trews (E253)

10 February 2015

Reaction to the news that a show called Immigration Street is in the works as it is revealed that HSBC helped clients avoid paying millions in tax.

By Jeremy Corbyn in Britain:

Caught red-handed yet again

Thursday 12th February 2015

It should surprise nobody that the financial elites and the coalition government work hand-in-glove to swindle HM Revenue and Customs, writes Jeremy Corbyn

Last July Finsbury Park Mosque received a very strange letter from their bank informing them that their two accounts were about to be closed because they fell outside the “risk appetite” of that institution.

The bank sent similar letters to some other mosques, organisations and people active in Muslim communities. The mosque’s shocked worshippers drew attention to the decision, highlighting Section 29 of the Equality Act, and demonstrated outside one of its branches.

The bank of course was HSBC.

A short time later I took part in an utterly bizarre meeting with its chief executive in Britain, Antonio P S Simoes, in his office on the 26th floor in the salubrious Canary Wharf complex.

We enjoyed excellent coffee and biscuits in a wood-panelled room adorned with oil paintings. Simoes informed us once again that the bank did not discriminate against mosques, and that the problem was the bank’s “risk appetite.” Beyond that he couldn’t tell us anything.

An hour of persuasion on the good works of the excellent community mosque, alongside the anger existing in the local community, did not move him on what was clearly a corporate decision taken far away from the luxury of his office, in the bank’s international headquarters.

The background to the cull of accounts was the $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) fine which the US courts had imposed on the bank after it was caught violating sanction laws and laundering Mexican drug cartel money.

The bank was clearly paranoid that another violation of banking laws anywhere could lead to the loss of its US licence, and indeed an Ohio Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, is demanding explanations from the US government in respect to the latest revelations on tax evasion.

The British government has been forced into a statement concerning the bank’s operations in Britain and the systematic way in which it has enabled its customers to place very large sums of money in Swiss bank accounts where they are protected by the notorious banking secrecy laws, thus avoiding income and corporate taxation in Britain.

The nervousness of the Tories is palpable as Lord Green, a former HSBC UK director and trade and investment minister, as well as being an ordained priest, is clearly in the hot seat.

He did manage to write a book about reconciling God and Mammon and it will be interesting to see who he now thinks has the upper hand in the aggrandisement of personal wealth.

Last week, Ed Miliband was castigated by much of the media for being anti-business when he drew attention to the corporate tax avoidance that is happening on such a grand scale in Britain.

Dennis Skinner and others in Parliament pointed out that anyone accused of not paying council tax, overclaiming benefits or not paying small amounts of tax owed to HMRC gets pursued to the umpteenth degree and some even end up in prison.

The very largest companies and taxpayers are allowed to negotiate their way out of the problem and avoid any sanction. For all the estimates of the money owed by the 7,000 British bank account holders in HSBC Switzerland, only 1,100 have had any level of investigation and only $135 million (£88.5 million) has been paid back.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists estimates that the total amount banked by these customers is £20bn. There is the scandal of corporations relocating to low-tax environments by claiming that their entire turnover is in that jurisdiction rather than Britain. Thus Amazon, Starbucks and Boots pay far less tax than they should for their operations.

It would be nice if the general election turned into one about social justice in Britain — how the bedroom tax has impoverished and made homeless so many people, how work capability assessments by the Department for Work and Pensions have driven some disabled people to suicide and how real wages have fallen and homelessness has risen.

The Tories have just hosted a dinner at £15,000 a head and the collective wealth gathered in the London Grosvenor House ballroom amounted to over £22bn, demonstrating the obscenity of an inequality that has got worse in the past five years.

It is up to the labour movement to force the closure of the tax havens and make those with massive wealth pay the taxes they owe.

Le Monde owner’s criticism of HSBC leak coverage lays bare fragility of press freedom. Roy Greenslade: Pierre Bergé’s intervention over French paper’s decision to publish names of Swiss bank account holders shows how private ownership compromises paper’s claims to independence: here.

HSBC’s Swiss bank concealed large sums of money for people facing allegations of serious wrongdoing, including drug-running, corruption and money laundering, leaked files reveal. Despite being legally obliged since 1998 to make special checks on high-risk customers, the bank provided accounts for clients implicated in six notorious scandals in Africa, including Kenya’s biggest corruption case, blood diamond trading and several corrupt military sales: here.

HSBC scandal: Bank’s former boss Stephen Green resigns from UK finance lobbying group: here.

This video from England is called People’s Climate March London 21st September 2014.

The Jeremy Corbyn article continues:

The right to protest is a precious and important one. It is fundamental to any democracy. Co-operation with the police has always been a sensitive area and indeed current legislation requires agreement with the police on march and demonstration routes. However, something very fundamental has changed this week.

The organisers of the Time to Act climate change march have been told that if they go ahead with their planned demonstration, they will have to pay the bill for temporary traffic reorganisation in the area.

The event was expected to attract 20,000 people, and has been told that it must pay for stewards and pay for the cost of traffic reorganisation. This makes the organising of any demonstration virtually impossible for any organisation.

The Metropolitan Police seem to be using the excuse of cuts in their budget to remove the possibility of anyone organising any legitimate demonstration in London.

They pretend that there is no question of demonstrators paying for direct policing — yet the effect is exactly the same, as obviously any march or demonstration does disrupt traffic and requires some rerouting ahead of the event.

Fortunately a lot of people are already complaining about this. Everyone who believes in free speech and in the right to protest should get together and say we are simply not accepting it.

This 17 February 2015 video shows Yemi Hailemariam, wife of Andargachew Tsige, speaking about her husband’s imprisonment.

Andargachew Tsege is an Ethiopian opposition figure who left the country many years ago and has lived as a British national in my constituency since then.

He was tried in absentia by a court in Addis Ababa, found guilty of plotting against the Ethiopian government and sentenced to death. Last year, when he arrived at Sanaa airport in Yemen in transit he was brutally dragged from the plane, forced onto a private plane, flown to Ethiopia and thrown into prison.

Initially his family had no idea where he was. He has been allowed only two consular visits and one phone call to his family. Legal action charity Reprieve has taken up the case and we’ve had a number of meetings with the Ethiopian embassy on this.

Last week we were flatly told that the British parliamentary delegation (including me) would not be allowed to visit him in prison. A separate application for Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith to visit him is being considered.

Monday was Andy’s 60th birthday. After we presented a petition to Downing Street demanding action by the British government to secure his release, a big demonstration of family, friends and supporters assembled in Whitehall to wish him happy birthday and demand his freedom.

Africa hurt by tax dodgers

Posted on February 11, 2015 by petrel41

This 9 February 2015 video from Britain is called HSBC: The Bank of Tax Cheats – Panorama (2015).

Britain: HSBC files show Tories raised over £5m from HSBC Swiss account holders. Labour too has received cash and loans from bank’s clients, while leaked documents also reveal many donors with HSBC accounts had non-dom tax status: here.

LABOUR PARTY leader Miliband clashed with Prime Minister Cameron over political donors who held Swiss bank accounts with HSBC, during questions in the House of Commons yesterday: here.

DAVID CAMERON’s longstanding vow to make “damn sure” that tax dodgers pay up was left a laughing stock yesterday after Tory treasurer Lord Fink admitted avoiding tax while claiming that “everyone does it”: here.

‘We are all tax avoiders’ says Tory Lord Fink: here.

By Thabo Seseane Jr. in South Africa:

Africa subject to billions in illicit capital flight

11 February 2015

A report adopted by the African Union on February 1 indicates that African governments are losing some US$5 billion a year in unpaid taxes, royalties and other charges as companies, criminals and wealthy individuals illegally siphon money from the continent.

The report ranks South Africa third, behind Nigeria and Egypt, in terms of cumulative losses between 1970 and 2008, which it says amounted to US$81.8 billion or 11.4 percent of Africa’s total illicit capital outflows. It was authored by a panel established in 2012 by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and headed by former South African president Thabo Mbeki.

Speaking at the report’s launch, Mbeki contrasted the estimated US$50 billion annual outflow to the total inflow of US$25 billion of aid and foreign direct investment. However, thanks to its opacity, the unlawful expatriation of capital from Africa is hard to quantify.

A 2008 study covering the years 2002 to 2006 found that the continent lost US$859 billion in cumulative capital flight. This compares to a 2010 study of the period 1970 to 2008, which arrived at a figure of between US$854 billion and US$1.8 trillion in illegally lost capital.

Whatever the actual figures, they represent a huge loss of revenue for African states, with mining and fossil fuel companies accused of being the worst culprits for the continent’s capital loss and resulting underdevelopment. A report by Sarah Bracking and Khadija Sharife on the South African diamond mining sector put the 2011 value of all uncut production at US$1.73 billion. The authors found that the biggest companies, De Beers and Petra Diamonds, accounting for 95 percent of all production, paid just US$11 million in royalties for 2010 to 2011.

Other studies expressed illegal capital flight as a ratio of gross domestic product (GDP). According to research cited by Jeff Rudin, associate researcher at the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC) in Cape Town, illicit capital flight increased from 9.2 percent of GDP in 1994 to 23 percent in 2007. “This means,” Rudin observes, “that, at the same time the government was implementing Thatcherite neoliberal policies to bring foreign investment to South Africa, a vastly greater volume of capital was leaving our country.” …

Some of the architects of South Africa’s capital flight gathered under the aegis of the F. W. De Klerk Foundation in early February. The dignitaries celebrated 25 years since De Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, made the speech announcing the unbanning of liberation movements such as the ANC, and the release of political prisoners including Nelson Mandela who succeeded De Klerk and, jointly with him, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for laying the foundations for a democratic South Africa.

Businessman Johann Rupert, patriarch of the richest South African family with some US$7 billion in assets, said at the event that demands for higher wages were not sustainable. In terms of spreading opportunities more evenly, he explained, “My family has always held that one must repatriate wealth to South Africa.”

His words were at odds with remarks attributed to Johann Van Loggerenberg, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) executive in charge of enforcement and investigations who abruptly resigned on February 4. Van Loggerenberg was suspended last year amid allegations of running a “rogue” unit, which among other accusations is said to have run a brothel and spied on President Jacob Zuma. When suspended, he was overseeing an investigation into an apparent tax avoidance scheme of British American Tobacco, a multinational controlled by Rupert and which Van Loggerenberg said was illegally withholding about R1 billion (US$89 million) due to SARS.

Criminal HSBC bank and the British government

Posted on February 10, 2015 by petrel41

This video says about itself:

HSBC Worked With Dictators, Child Soldiers & Al-Qaeda

9 February 2015

Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.

By Richard Bagley in Britain:

Leaked HSBC dossier reveal the stink of a Tory tax cover-up

Tuesday 10th February 2015

Government only probes a handful of super-rich tax-dodgers exposed in Swiss HSBC leak

Ministers were landed in boiling water yesterday over their role in an apparent cover-up protecting wealthy Tory backers caught up in illegal tax-dodging scams run by a shadowy Swiss wing of HSBC bank.

Leaked documents stripped away the shroud of secrecy that has protected over 130,000 super-wealthy individuals worldwide and hushed up the bank’s role advising them how to hide their billions from tighter tax rules.

HM Revenue and Customs’ hands-off approach towards wealthy tax-dodgers was savaged as it emerged that only a few hundred out of an initial list of 6,800 suspicious British names in a French dossier had been confronted.

Out-of-court deals for dodged back payments totalled £135 million, but so far there has only been one prosecution.

Questions also mounted over PM David Cameron’s 2010 appointment of trade minister Lord Green — then a chief at the bank — months after secret details of the scandal reached the corridors of power.

The peer remained in hiding yesterday as the scandal surrounding a Panorama film aired last night grew.

Public accounts committee chair Margaret Hodge said: “Either he didn’t know and he was asleep at the wheel, or he did know and he was therefore involved in dodgy tax practices.”

MPs rounded on the Tories during an urgent Commons session.

Treasury Minister David Gauke claimed that Paris had not intended that the information be shared beyond HMRC, ruling out its use in criminal prosecutions.

Only around 1,000 out of an eventual 3,600 individuals had been challenged, he confirmed casually, while the tax authorities “continue to monitor” the dealings of the rest.

But Labour shadow Shabana Mahmood said the government’s explanations “simply don’t go far enough.

“We need much more detail as to what the government have been up to since they were made aware of this information and why they failed to act,” she said.

Labour MP Frank Dobson urged that the tax dodgers’ identities now be revealed by the government.

“The public really can’t understand why the names of these self-confessed tax swindlers are remaining secret,” he said.

The government should publish the list “to enable the public to see that list” and allow for cross-referencing with a list of Tory donors.

Labour MP John Mann, a member of the Treasury select committee, confirmed that he had written to committee chair Andrew Tyrie to demand a confrontation with HMRC bosses.

“HSBC have been found to have helped its wealthiest clients avoid paying tax in the UK and it appears that HMRC not only knew about this but chose to do nothing about it,” fumed Mr Mann.

Tax expert Richard Murphy warned that the HSBC dealings, which only came to light in 2007 when an employee blew the whistle, were likely just the tip of the iceberg.

He described it as “exceptionally unlikely that such abuse was restricted to that bank” and it suggested “widespread criminality was at play.”

HSBC leaks: David Cameron faces grilling over party links with scandal-hit bank: here.

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: here.

HSBC files: international outcry over activities at bank’s Swiss arm. Revelations of collusion with wealthy and criminal clients in tax malpractice triggers furious response around the world: here.

HSBC files: Swiss bank aggressively pushed way for clients to avoid new tax. Far from acting as passive party to clients’ tax schemes, HSBC Suisse marketed device to effectively sabotage European savings directive: here.

HSBC a repeat offender that will never change: here.

LABOUR demanded answers from Chancellor George Osborne yesterday after the revelation that hundreds of super-rich HSBC customers had struck out-of-court settlements rather than face prosecution for tax avoidance: here.

Labour veteran Dennis Skinner tore into the tax cover-up Tories yesterday for waging war on benefits claimants but stripping funds from departments aimed at hunting down fraud by the rich: here.

The Tories were accused of trying to “buy David Cameron the keys to Downing Street” at a clandestine supper club for the super-rich yesterday. The guest list for their exclusive “Black and White Ball” at London’s five-star Grosvenor House hotel in London will be kept secret: here.

Last year the wealth of Britain’s 1,000 richest people rose by 15 per cent to a total of £519 billion. That’s equivalent to half of Britain’s entire national debt and almost 20 times Britain’s current account deficit — the £27bn that the government says must be saved by cuts in public services: here.

TOMAS BYRNE had a high-powered job in investment banking but gave it all up to write a thriller exposing globalised wealth plundering. He tells Paul Simon why: here.

‘HSBC, a criminal bank’

Posted on November 17, 2014 by petrel41

This 2011 music video from Brazil is called Is It A Crime – Sade Show, HSBC Arena, Rio de Janeiro.

Little did singer Sade then suspect about the crimes of HSBC bank, after which the theater where she sang was named …

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands:

“HSBC is a criminal bank”

Monday, 17 Nov 2014 14:39 (Update: 17-11-14, 14:50)

The Belgian judiciary has opened the hunt for the British bank HSBC and will drag the bank to court. The Swiss branch of the bank is said to have lured for years Belgian customers, mainly from the Antwerp diamond world, in a roundabout way with their money to Switzerland.

The Belgian state is said to have lost by the Swiss connection hundreds of millions of euros in tax revenues.

The allegations of the Belgian investigating judge Michel Claise are strong stuff. Serious and organized tax fraud, money laundering, criminal organization and working illegally as a financial intermediary.

Recruitment

The HSBC practices came to light four years ago. The Antwerp prosecutor received a CD-ROM with data of Belgian HSBC account holders in Switzerland. The bank is said to have helped a thousand wealthy clients to evade taxes.

In recent years it was investigated how the bank worked and recruited customers. Through inter alia, shelf companies in Panama and the Virgin Islands billions were siphoned off into the Swiss bank branch.

Biggest

HSBC, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, is an old British bank, founded in 1865 to finance trade with the Far East. After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 it moved its headquarters to London. The bank employs about 300,000 people. In 2008, it was the largest bank in the world.

HSBC together with four other major banks recently was fined billions of euros for manipulating exchange rates. The bank is also accused of messing with the Euribor interest.

TAX agency AFIP head Ricardo Echegaray accused British transnational bank HSBC on Thursday of helping more than 4,000 rich Argentinians to dodge taxes through secret Swiss accounts: here.

HSBC files show how Swiss bank helped clients dodge taxes and hide millions. Data in massive cache of leaked secret bank account files lift lid on questionable practices at subsidiary of one of world’s biggest financial institutions: here.

Banking Giant HSBC Sheltered Murky Cash Linked to Dictators and Arms Dealers: here.

Bankers want still more power

Posted on August 8, 2014 by petrel41

This video from the USA says about itself:

Former VP of HSBC: “We were laundering 100’s of millions for drugs & terrorism”

27 March 2014

The global banking giant HSBC is a “criminal” operation, charges a former officer for the company’s southern New York region in this interview with Russell Scott.

John Cruz, a former vice president and relationship manager, has turned over more than 1,000 pages of documents, including customer account ledgers for dozens of companies through which, he charges, the financial institution was laundering money each month.

As a relationship manager, it was his responsibility to look up various accounts in the HSBC computer system and visit the account holders in person to offer additional banking products and services.

“I pulled these documents because I thought they were evidence of suspicious activity taking place. These same documents I brought to bank security and my managers in the bank.”

To his surprise, HSBC management and security did not welcome his reports of suspicious activity.

“My managers told me I was crazy and I didn’t know what I was talking about,” he said. “They told me it was none of my business what goes on in transactions. But that’s my job.”

By Solomon Hughes in Britain:

Revenge of the bankers

Friday 8th August 2014

New Labour failed to cut the banks down to size — but they are still trying to wriggle out of even mild regulation, says SOLOMON HUGHES

Whatever happened to banking reform? The banks threw the world economy into crisis in 2008. Thousands lost their jobs, their homes and their health. But HSBC boss Douglas Flint has just launched a “fightback” against the limited post-crash reforms.

Announcing HSBC’s 2014 results, Flint said his staff had “growing fatigue” with regulation and that the new rules caused “disproportionate risk aversion.”

Flint also sent a secret note to George Osborne and the Bank of England asking them to suspend the main, already-watered-down post-crash banking regulation.

After 2008 there was a real chance to reform the banks rather than simply bailing them out. But it looks like they are just going to take the subsidy without offering any change, mostly thanks to Labour.

In his August chairman’s statement, Flint says that thanks to regulations there is a “danger of disproportionate risk aversion creeping into decision-making,” warning that “unwarranted risk aversion” will stop loans and “risks unwinding parts of the eco-system of networks and relationships that support global trade and investment.”

Basically Flint is saying that unless regulators stop prosecuting banks for cheating customers or investing in mad schemes, they are going to stop lending altogether. UK banks are already bad at investing in the productive economy, thanks to the terms of Gordon Brown and Ed Balls’s bailout.

Banks were given government cash to stop them going bust but weren’t forced to agree to lend to job-creating industries as part of the deal. HSBC didn’t get the direct investment that went into RBS and Lloyds, but it did get short-term loans from the special liquidity scheme.

Without the general taxpayer support of the financial system, they wouldn’t be in any kind of condition to try to bully us out of bank regulation. We saved the banks that now want to slash the rules.

Worse, Flint has written to Osborne asking him to suspend the rules establishing “ring fences” between investment and retail banking.

These rules are supposed to stop the banks demanding further bailouts. In 2008 governments thought banks were “too big to fail,” leaving them no choice but throw our cash into their coffers, even though their failure was the fault of their bad investments.

Governments worried that failing investment banks would destroy people’s individual savings, because the same banks that invested in the “collateralised debt obligations” and other “derivatives” that turned out to be a house of cards also ran high-street “retail” banks.

So there was a post-crash pressure to separate “investment” and “retail” banking. In future, an investment bank that backed the wrong numbers in the casino would be allowed to go bust.

Or it would have been if investment and retail banking had really been separated.

The Vickers Commission, the main inquiry into bank reform in Britain, was nobbled by banking pressure, so it merely argued for internal “firewalls” between investment and retail branches.

But the scandals over banks lying over Libor rates, over “pump and dump” schemes where banks offloaded dodgy investments and over simple cheating of customers through PPI scams show that banks don’t respect “firewalls” or “Chinese walls” or any other internal rules.

Labour’s second failure, after the unconditional bailouts, was to accept the Vickers report and not argue for full separation.

New Labour fell head over heels in love with capitalism at precisely the point capitalism became most rotten and so was unable to press for reform in office or opposition.

It has recovered a little under Ed Miliband’s little shuffle away from new Labour. But not enough to make a difference.

The Tories, stuffed with City cash, will not reform the City. But the chance that a Labour government will do much more is slim.

Labour’s current policy to deal with big risky banks that cheat customers, won’t invest and might go bust again is to encourage new small “challenger” banks. The “free market” failed massively but Labour hopes another dose of a “freer market” will help.

Compare this to Labour’s previous responses to banking failure. The 1945 Labour government thought the City didn’t invest in British industry enough. So it set up its own state-run investment bank.

In the 1970s Harold Wilson didn’t like the way banks would only open accounts for middle-class people so he set up Girobank. Faced with banking failure, Labour didn’t just wait for new “challenger” banks, it set them up.

The 1945 Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation was very successful in funding British industry and Girobank revolutionised high-street banking with computerisation.

The Tories hated both initiatives for challenging the City and hated them more when they were successful, so both were privatised. But Old Labour didn’t just rely on “the market.”

The left outside Labour also did much more to press for banking reform. Labour was so in love with the City that it gave Douglas Flint a CBE in 2006.

But at the same time the “anti-capitalist” movement was developing a critique of neoliberalism.

This tended to focus on the financialisation of “our” bits of society — on PFI, trade deals and privatisation of public services — rather than regulating “their” bit — the banks. It was a little defensive but it was real and much more productive than Labour’s thinking.

When the crisis hit, the Occupy movement pressed for change. It changed the language about the crash, making it an issue about the “1 per cent” versus the “99 per cent” instead of just a “natural” disaster.

Occupy was often accused of being unrealistic. But Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters magazine, who more or less founded Occupy, was very coherent.

At the start of the protests in 2011 he recommended “a Robin Hood tax on all trades … bring back the Glass-Steagall Act … ban high-frequency flash trading, implement banking reform, clean up corruption in Washington.”

This is a much more coherent approach to banking than Labour’s. Glass-Steagall is the law brought in under President Franklin Roosevelt separating retail and investment banking.

“Robin Hood” taxes levied on international finance depress speculation and raise revenue. His other recommendations are equally sound.

The lesson here is the “respectable” political opposition can’t offer “reasonable” reform without pressure from the “unreasonable” opposition in the streets.

HSBC bankers and Al Qaeda, drugs bosses and rainforest deforestation

Posted on November 7, 2013 by petrel41

This video from Britain says about itself:

Bill Oddie evicted from HSBC headquarters after protest over bank’s links to logging companies

25 May 2013

Bill Oddie evicted from HSBC headquarters after protest over bank’s links to logging companies blamed for destruction of the rainforest in Malaysia

Campaign group Global Witness releases satirical film featuring BBC presenter

Bill Oddie, the naturalist and BBC television presenter, has made a provocative protest film intended to embarrass the global bank HSBC over its links to logging companies blamed for the destruction of the rainforest in Malaysia.

The presenter of programmes including Springwatch and Wild in Your Garden was evicted from HSBC’s London headquarters while making a film about the bank’s ties to loggers in the state of Sarawak in Borneo, where less than 5% of the rainforests are unaffected by deforestation or palm oil plantations.

The campaign group Global Witness has released the satirical film — called Bankwatch with Bill Oddie – to back a public petition calling on Stuart Gulliver, chief executive of HSBC, to end its relationship with the logging companies which fail to meet the bank’s own sustainability policies.

Clutching his binoculars as he walks about the City of London, Oddie is shown in the film “entering the territory of a creature that’s very closely related to man”, namely “the banker”.

Before he is forcibly ejected by security guards from the “main den” of HSBC headquarters, he makes some scathing observations. “Like most great predators, the HSBC banker sits at the top of the financial food chain totally oblivious to the impact of its appetite on the local eco-system,” he says. “The HSBC banker has a diet which is made up almost exclusively of molluscs and Bollinger so the millions made from logging in Borneo are key to his survival.”

Global Witness last year highlighted that HSBC had provided loans and services to logging companies with close links to the Sarawak chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, who is under investigation by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission.

“HSBC has made an absolute killing helping some of the world’s worst logging companies get off the ground,” said Oddie. “According to HSBC’s own rules and all the evidence, it shouldn’t be touching them with a bargepole. As a result the last of Borneo’s rainforests are under immediate threat. Everyone needs to sign the petition to stop HSBC profiting from deforestation in Malaysia and beyond, before it’s too late.” …

The Independent recently reported how the state of Sarawak used the British television presenter Ben Fogle to front a tourism propaganda campaign in which he extolled the beauty of the rainforests to potential tourists.

Mr Fogle has said he would not be making any more films for the Sarawak Tourism Board until he received answers to “many questions” he has in relation to recent revelations over deforestation issues in the state .

HSBC, one of the biggest banks in the world, recently became infamous for various things, including links to Al Qaeda and drugs criminals. These are not the only things …

From Wildlife Extra:

HSBC bank found to fund rainforest deforestation

Report shows High Street bank HSBC funds projects in the palm oil industry that threaten the habitat of orangutans and other endangered species.

November 2013: Bank account holders with HSBC have been hit with the relevations that the bank has bankrolled unlawful clearing of rainforest, putting orangutans and other endangered wildlife at risk.

Research conducted by the Environmental Investigation Agency has found that Bumitama Agri Ltd, a company the bank has invested heavily in, forged ahead with rainforest clearance even though it didn’t have the required HCV (High Conservation Value) assessment.

“HSBC’s 60 million customers around the world would be surprised and appalled to learn that such a high-profile and trusted brand is profiting from large-scale deforestation even as it projects a wholesome public image of sustainability,” said EIA Forests Campaigner Jago Wadley.

The bank relies on Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification system, to ensure companies they invest in are environmentally and sustainably sound but this is not good enough says the EIA.

“In our experience, the RSPO lacks credible mechanisms to ensure its members protect High Conservation Value (HCV) forests, and even when such violations are brought to its attention its measures are insufficient to either compensate for the damage or serve as a disincentive,” said Jago. “In effect, HSBC is delegating responsibility for its ethics to a broken system and that’s just not good enough when the future of some of the world’s last remaining precious rainforests and species are at stake.”

And it’s not the only example. The bank has also invested in RSPO member Triputra Agro Persada, which was found by EIA investigators to be clearing an area covered in closed-canopy forests holding rare species of flora and fauna including ulin, or ironwood, and gibbons.

The report calls for HSBC to immediately engage with Bumitama and Triputra to ensure no further clearance occurs prior to HCV assessments.

“HSBC is one of the world’s largest banks and is a key player in the plantation sector,” added Jago. “It now has a clear choice between choosing to be a force for good or to carry on hiding behind a fig leaf of sustainability while making huge profits from deforestation.”

What do you think? Will this stop you banking with HSBC?

HSBC financing deforestation for palm oil in Borneo: here.

HSBC: the bank that likes to say no to Muslim accounts. Finsbury Park mosque and other Islamic groups have been told they no longer satisfy HSBC’s ‘risk appetite’: here.

Whistleblower: HSBC ‘lied to MPs’: here.

How Australian bank financed the heroin trade: here.

Leaked World Bank lending policies ‘environmentally disastrous’ New ‘light touch’ rules on bank’s $50bn annual lending have been gutted to remove protections, watchdogs claim: here.

HSBC HID TRANSACTIONS FOR ACCOUNTS TOTALING OVER $100 BILLION “HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.” [The Guardian]