HSBC bank in the UK 'helped clients evade millions in taxes'
Reports show that Britain’s biggest bank has helped wealthy clients cheat the UK out of millions of pounds in tax
Thousands of accounts from HSBC's private bank in Switzerland were leaked by a whistleblower in 2007. Documents reveal that bankers allegedly helped clients evade tax and offered deals to help tax dodgers stay one step ahead of the law.
HSBC has admitted that some individuals took advantage of bank secrecy to hold undeclared accounts, but it said it insisted that it has now "fundamentally changed".
A computer expert working for HSBC in Geneva, had stolen the documents that contain details of more than 100,000 clients from around the world.
Although offshore accounts are not illegal, many people use them to hide cash from the tax authorities, and while tax avoidance is perfectly legal, deliberately hiding money to evade tax is not.
The French authorities had assessed the stolen documents and concluded in 2013 that 99.8% of their citizens on the list were probably evading tax.
The data was obtained by the French newspaper Le Monde, and in a joint investigation, the documents have now been passed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Guardian newspaper, Panorama and more than 50 media outlets around the world.
The BBC reports that HSBC did not just ignore tax evaders , but it actively broke the law by helping its clients. It gave one wealthy family a foreign credit card so they could withdraw their undeclared cash at cashpoints overseas, and it helped its tax-dodging clients to stay ahead of the law.
HSBC has effectively denied that all these account holders were evading tax.
