LONDON: HSBC Holdings PLC could be open to criminal charges in the U.K. over the role played by its Swiss private bank in a massive tax-evasion scheme, according to Lord Ken Macdonald, who served as director of public prosecutions in England and Wales between 2003 and 2008.
He said a decision to forgo prosecution made by the British tax-collection agency called Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, or HMRC, was “seriously flawed,” BBC News reported Sunday.
Macdonald made his observations in a legal opinion prepared for the consumer organization SumOfUs, which is based in New York and incorporated in Washington.
It seems clear, from the evidence we have seen, that there exists credible evidence that HSBC Swiss and/or its employees have engaged over many years in systematic and profitable collusion in serious criminal activity against the exchequers of a number of countries,” BBC News quoted Macdonald as saying in his opinion.
The corporate and wholesale nature of HSBC’s Swiss’ apparent involvement in what amounts to grave cross border crime makes it all the more obvious that the relevant evidence, once it came the attention of HMRC, should have been the subject of urgent and sustained criminal investigation,” BBC News quoted Macdonald as saying.
Neither HSBC nor SumOfUs replied to International Business Times email messages requesting information before this article’s publication.
HSBC has faced a lot of scrutiny over its Swiss private bank’s past operations this month since documents about them were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists via the Paris-based newspaper Le Monde. The leaked files are associated with accounts holding more than $100 billion.
