HSBC - more unpleasant goings on

I think it's because you can use your card abroad without it costing you, Tegan. You can also get free travel insurance. I do not really know as I do not travel abroad, either.

This is part of the Guardian timeline about HSBC and Lord Green.

"In May 2010, HMRC was handed a reconstructed UK version of the data by the French. But while tax inspectors began ploughing through their evidence at their London headquarters, a change of British government was taking place.

Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition came to power. A couple of weeks later, it was reported that Green would step down from his £1.25m-a-year HSBC job, and by August Cameron was reported to have persuaded him to take on the post of trade minister.

“In Stephen we will be appointing a minister with a long career as a leading international banker,” the Lib Dem business secretary, Vince Cable, said in a statement issued after the announcement: “One of the few to emerge with credit from the recent financial crisis, and somebody who has set out a powerful philosophy for ethical business.”

A source close to Cable said the welcoming remarks on Green referred to HSBC’s position as the sole major UK bank not requiring a bailout in the financial crisis, and to Green’s writings and speeches on ethical business."

This is all on the day that Cameron has told bosses to give Britain a pay rise. Not enough to open a Swiss bank account, I presume.

Part of one of NWs current accounts includes free cash withdrawals abroad - that's probsbly what he meant. Their credit card ( which I use home and abroad) offers a better deal than other credit cards when using abroad ( and gives cash back)but I use them because I despise and loathe the high street banks.

If they're all crooked I might as well bank with a crooked one that rewards me for it ....I'd use the Post Office but out village post office is probably going to close down in the next year or so. I did consider Nationwide but when I showed the financial adviser there the deal that I would get with Santander he said there was no way that he could match it. It would only pay me to switch to them if I travelled abroad a lot [can't explain why; don't understand finance much].

I do almost all my banking on line and their mobile app is great

I've been with Nationwide for at least 20 years. It's not a bank but offers the same range of services ( minus advice on tax evasion and selling PPI). I don't understand why anyway banks with a bank ( iyswim).

I'm in Nationwide, Eloethan. I'm sure you can find something bad about them.

This is what other countries are doing about it.

"Outside the UK, calls multiplied throughout the day for investigations into events at HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary, whose inner workings have been exposed in data covering the period from 2005 to 2007.

• In Belgium, where HSBC Switzerland is under investigation over tax fraud allegations, a judge is considering issuing international arrest warrants for directors of the Swiss division of the bank.

• In Switzerland, senior politicians called for investigations by regulators into the scandal.

• In the United States, a leading member of the Senate banking committee asked the US government to explain what action it took after receiving a massive cache of the leaked bank accounts.

• In Denmark, the government said it would seek the names of its citizens who may have used Swiss bank accounts to avoid domestic taxes.

• In France, which has also launched an investigation, the prime minister, Manuel Valls, said he was determined to fight tax evasion and would continue to take action at home and on a European level.

Evidence that the bank colluded with hundreds of clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts and used its Geneva branch to hand out bricks of cash in a variety of currencies from euros to pounds has been sitting in the hands of tax officials around the world since May 2010.

While France, Belgium, Spain, the US and Argentina have launched legal proceedings against HSBC and its high net worth clients, the UK’s tax authority has in five years used the data to bring only one prosecution.

Meanwhile, neither HM Revenue and Customs, the Serious Fraud Office nor the Financial Conduct Authority have taken action against HSBC."

Santander was fined £1.5m in 2012 for failing to inform customers that some of their financial products were less safe because they had limited protection.

It was fined £12.4 m.in 2014 for "widespread investment failings".

It seems that virtually all the banks have been heavily criticised and fined for one or more failings.

I'm thinking of transferring mine to the P.O.

I'm off to Santander tomorrow...

So how many of you who still have an HSBC a/c will be walking.
I left some years ago when it was discovered how they were laundering Mexican drug cartel money.
Then I went to the Coop and we all know what happened there. So now it's Santander.
Nobody in power is going to do a thing. The only thing that will hurt them is, if everyone takes their money out.

www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2015/feb/09/hsbcs-presbyterian-principles-forgotten-in-the-global-dash-for-cash

Just read this in the Guardian.
Apparently Lord Green is an ordained vicar, presumably hoping to go to heaven.

I thought he did give Dennis Skinner the figures of staffing levels in various departments.
Are you sure?

I know Skinner didn't hang around long to hear any more of the session once he had asked his question!

HSBC should be charged with criminal offences.

Sorry, meant nobody from the government.

Got that idea from the fact that nobody would be interviewed on the Panorama programme, Penstemmon.

I also appreciated Lord Green, who earned £3m. per year from HSBC, saying that he would not comment on HSBC business past and present "as a matter of principle".

Richard Brooks said that no other crime has been effectively decriminalised.

On Radio 4 today, on my way to work, this issue was being discussed. Someone..did not catch the name... but I believe a current Tory MP said that they were keen to put an end to 'that particular type of evasion' rather implying, by the way it was said , that there might be some evasions they would not be keen to put an end to!

On Panorama NOW

POGS, did you not see Dennis Skinner asking Gauke why there were 3200 DWP staff working on benefit fraud, but only 300 HMRC officials on tax fraud?

Just because Gauke did not answer does not mean it wasn't a good question. Not productive because Gauke did not have a proper answer.

Panorama now.

"I was amused by David Gauke’s entry in the Accountancy Age financial power list for 2013, in which I also appear. They said of him:

It’s astonishing given what has happened on tax that Gauke has remained below the radar. Now that David Cameron says that the department for which he’s responsible, which is H M Revenue & Customs, has got it all wrong, it’s time he faced the music.

After all, this is the man who has refused to acknowledge the importance of the tax gap, or its true scale, and this is the man who likes to talk about people paying cash to the plumber rather than face up to the organised criminal reality of what happens in tax havens and this is the man who makes speeches to the FTSE 100 group undermining the importance of paying corporation tax and praising PWC’s total tax contribution charade of an accounting system that is designed to confuse and distort tax debate by delivering spin that favours big companies rather than support country-by-country reporting which would disclose just who is and is not really paying tax in this country.

If there’s a man who personifies the failure, in the words of the Public Accounts Committee, of the UK government to get a grip on large corporations which generate significant income in the UK but pay little or no tax then it is David Gauke. No wonder under his leadership HMRC has failed “to challenge practices to prevent the abuse of transfer pricing, royalty payments, intellectual property pricing and interest payments“.

I really do hope 2013 is the year when his teflon coating fails."

This was two years ago. Hasn't happened, has it?

www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/02/06/pwc-promoting-tax-avoidance-on-an-industrial-scale

I wonder if David Gauke still works for them.

Speaker Bercow did not chair the Urgent Question, he vacated the chair when it started to Lynsey Hoyle. Speaker Bercow had to 'allow' the Urgent Question. I did not say he also chaired the session!

David Gauke was there but both sides left it to the underlings. Ed Balls was nowhere to be seen either. Perhaps that's because they knew this was not going to be a productive time and left it to Shabina Mahmood to put it in her name.

There were no productive questions in my opinion.

The other well known phrase is "commercial confidentiality". It means we're not going to tell you.

What does it mean in Switzerland, granjura? Do you lose money? Do your banks close? Are the papers worried or laughing at us?

the link you posted Djen is from 2011! So just shows how long they were aware of it- and were supposed to have closed the loopholes.

"Not in the public interest" is a phrase that Governments use to try and get out of things.