Malaysia ranked No. 87 in dollars stashed in HSBC

KUALA LUMPUR: Secret Swiss banking files leaked a week ago show Malaysia is ranked 87 among the countries with the largest dollar amounts in the international financial centre, with approximately US$174.3 million in 2007.

The data taken from global banking group HSBC also showed t hat t he maximum amount of money associated with a client linked to Malaysia was US$67.7 million.

There were 201 bank accounts associated with 93 cl ients connected to Malaysia, according to the files, which have been dubbed SwissLeaks.

The country with the most client and dol lar amount is Switzerland, according to The International Consor tium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) website which posted details of the leaked files.

The leaked HSBC files – which were published by the Guardian newspaper and other media outlets last Sunday, and cover the period from 2005 to 2 0 07 – shed light on some 30,000 accounts holding almost US$120 billion of assets.

The Guardian said the files revealed that HSBC’s Swiss bankers aggressively marketed a device that would al low its clients to avoid a new tax. They also showed that the bank hid money for suspected criminals, it added.

The ICIJ had only named 6 3 people with accounts i n the Swiss arm of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank. The only Malaysian named is Sultanah Kalsom, the consort of Pahang’s Sultan Ahmad Shah.

It revealed t hat Sultanah Kalsom, listed by HSBC as a “housewife,” was linked to a client account under the name “3678TE” from September 1994 to November 1997. The leaked files do not specify the exact role that she had in relation to the account, the ICIJ said.

It added that she did not respond to repeated queries from the ICIJ.

To add perspective to the amounts held in the Swiss bank accounts, the website noted that Malaysia’s gross domestic product per capita in 2007 was US$7,200 while the World Bank 2007 statistics showed that the top 10% in Malaysia held 34.76% of the income then.

It also revealed that 77 client accounts were opened between 1982 and 2006 and linked to the 201 bank accounts in HSBC. Of the 93 clients associated with Malaysia, 28% have a Malaysian passport or nationality.

The SwissLeaks expose are based on data secreted away by Hervé Falciani, a former HSBC employee-turned-whistleblower who turned it over to the French government in 2008 and its tax authority launched an investigation.

That data reportedly showed that HSBC had helped thousands of its clients hide money in secret accounts held by its private bank in Switzerland.

The ICIJ said French newspaper Le Monde obtained a version of the tax authority data, which covers accounts of more than 100,000 clients (individuals and legal entities) from more than 200 countries.

The newspaper shared it with ICIJ with the agreement that it would assemble a global team of journalists to explore the data and produce this reporting project.

It said the data comes from three types of internal bank files from different time periods.

“One reflects clients and their associated private accounts at the Swiss branch of the bank mostly from 1988 to 2007.

“Another is a snapshot of the maximum amounts in the client accounts during 2006 and 2007.

“The third is of notes on clients and conversations with them made by bank employees during 2005,” said the ICIJ.

It explained that the files show the accounts to hold more than US$100 billion in total, from US$12.6 billion held in the name of governmental institutions from the Venezuela under the late former leader Hugh Chávez, to amounts recorded as zero.

The conf idential f iles also provide a wealth of other detail, such as secretive offshore companies linked to some accounts, said the ICIJ.