The trade minister, Lord Green, has been drawn in to the HSBC money laundering scandal after Labour warned he had “serious questions” to answer about the way the bank laundered money for drug cartels, terrorists and pariah states while he was at the helm.
Green was chief executive of Britain’s biggest bank between 2003 and 2006 and was its chairman until 2010 when he resigned to take up a position of trade minister in the coalition government.
A damning Senate report – which concluded the bank had a “pervasively polluted” culture – covers the period 2004 to 2010 and shows that HSBC subsidiaries moved billions of dollars around the financial system from countries such as Iran and Syria as well moving cash for Mexican drug cartels.
An example of an email reproduced in the report appears to show that Green was warned by HSBC’s head of compliance David Bagley – who dramatically resigned during Tuesday’s appearance before Senators – to alert him to a potential breach to the rules in relation to sanctions in trading with Burma. Bagley wrote there is a “significant risk of financial penalty” as there is “little doubt that it is a breach” of the sanctions (which were lifted in May this year). The report found that a new internal policy was introduced afterwards, but that transactions continued to occur.
Detailed news link: click here