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HSBC agrees to pay €300m to settle probe into tax evasion
HSBC has agreed to pay €300m to French authorities to settle a long-running investigation into allegations it helped wealthy clients of its Swiss private bank evade taxes. The probe into HSBC stemmed from data on thousands of French customers of the group’s Swiss private bank that were handed over to Paris authorities by Hervé Falciani, a former IT specialist at the bank In a statement, PNF, the national financial prosecutor’s office, said that more than €1.6bn of assets were involved in the scheme and the facts were “discovered as a result of the seizure and the exploitation of computer documents found at the home in France of a former employee of HSBC in January 2009”. According to the PNF, the bank accepted the alleged facts in the case. HSBC said it “has publicly acknowledged historical control weakness at the Swiss Private Bank on a number of occasions and has taken firm steps to address them”. One French prosecutor familiar with the case said: “This is finished provided the bank pays what they have to pay. I think they are going to pay very quickly and then the case is over.” The “Swiss leaks” data caused uproar in early 2015 when it was published by dozens of media outlets, showing how HSBC had actively helped many of its private bank’s customers to dodge the taxman around the world. Mr Falciani, who was convicted of “aggravated industrial espionage” by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court last year, fled Geneva with thousands of HSBC client files dating from 2006 and 2007. He has said he was seeking to reveal suspected tax evaders. The data fell into the hands of French authorities when they searched his home in the South of France in 2009 at the request of Swiss prosecutors after he had left the country. HSBC’s chief executive Stuart Gulliver apologised for the “unacceptable events that took place in Switzerland in the mid-2000s” when he was grilled with his former chairman Douglas Flint by British MPs over the controversy. Mr Gulliver also faced questions over why he had placed millions of dollars of bonus payments in a Panamanian company via HSBC’s Swiss private bank. HSBC was fined SFr40m by Swiss authorities in June 2015 for “organisational failings” that allowed money laundering to take place. Tax evasion is not a crime in Switzerland. The bank is still being investigated in the US and Belgium for allegedly helping clients to avoid taxes. The fine in France will not hit the bank’s results as it is covered by existing provisions, the bank said on Tuesday. A case against HSBC Holdings plc, the bank’s parent company, was dropped by the French prosecutor and the settlement was agreed by its Swiss private banking subsidiary. According to HSBC and the PNF, this is the first such agreement entered into under the Judicial Convention of Public Interest, a law comparable to deferred prosecution agreements used in the US. Under the terms of the law, which was introduced in 2016, such an agreement does not entail any finding of guilt against the Swiss Private Bank. Another Swiss bank, UBS, is facing criminal trial in France after failing to agree a settlement with prosecutors over allegations it helped wealthy clients to evade tax authorities. In March, the bank said the group and its French unit have been told that the investigative judges from PNF have decided to take the case to court. France’s public prosecutor would not, however, comment on any other case. UBS also declined to comment.
