HSBC bankers face criminal probe in Spain
ThREE British bankers are facing an investigation over alleged money laundering at the Swiss branch of hSBC.
A judge has ordered the probe into claims that seven senior bankers helped rich clients hide cash from the authorities. These include top financiers who moved into other senior City jobs after quitting the bank.
It came as hSBC bosses unveiled a 19pc fall in profits and announced they had hired 1,800 more staff to tackle financial crime.
Bankers under investigation include 58-year-old Clive Bannister, who was chief executive of the lender’s Swiss unit in 2006. he is now boss of Phoenix Group, a FTSE 250 firm and one of Britain’s largest life insurers.
Married father-of-three Bannister lives in a £6.1m townhouse in London’s fashionable Notting hill area, and was paid £2.8m last year.
The scandal he is embroiled in came to light after former hSBC IT expert hervé Falciani took files from the bank’s Swiss operation in 2008. They contained details of about 30,000 secret account holders and were seized by the French, then shared with other countries as part of a tax crackdown. Details were made public in 2015, with clients revealed to include the super-rich, arms dealers, blood diamond smugglers and corrupt businessmen.
Yesterday, Spanish judge Jose de le Mata ruled that Bannister and his former colleagues should be investigated. he did not order an investigation into hSBC itself.
he found evidence that they worked with Continental lenders Santander and BNP Paribas to transfer funds until at least 2008 so that clients could avoid tax in Spain.
Chris Meares, who ran the division in 2007, and its former chairman Peter Widmer, are also being investigated.
hSBC yesterday announced profits of £3.8bn in the first quarter of 2017, down 19pc from the same period a year earlier. Profits were chiefly down because of one-off accounting changes, but beat analysts’ expectations, sending shares up 2.8pc, or 18.6p, to 663.8p.