Continued from Murky Cash
Breaking the bank’s own policy
The documents raise new questions about past public statements by HSBC that staff did not help customers engage in tax evasion.
In July 2008, for example, Chris Meares, the then head of private banking for HSBC, told a British parliamentary hearing: “We prohibit our bankers from encouraging or being involved in tax evasion.”
Three years earlier one wealthy British client, Keith Humphreys, a director of the English Premier League soccer club Stoke City FC, is described telling his HSBC manager that one of his family’s Swiss accounts was “not declared” to the U.K. tax authorities. The files state it held more than $450,000 at the time.
Humphreys told ICIJ media partner, The Guardian, that the Swiss account was held not by him but by his father and that it was later voluntarily disclosed to authorities. The account, he said, “was established in line with financial advice that he was given at the time” and disclosed to British tax authorities in 2011, with a settlement of £147,165.
“This client is some what [sic] paranoid, e.g. whenever he was coming to ZH [Zurich], he flew to Paris and hired a car to drive to ZH”
In another instance, an HSBC employee wrote this note in the file of Irish businessman John Cashell, who would later to be convicted of a tax fraud in his native country: “His pre-occupation is with the risk of disclosure to the Irish authorities. Once again I endeavoured to reassure him that there is no risk of that happening.” Cashell did not respond to requests for comment.
The bank itself became uneasy over a €20 million transaction by a Serbian businessman. But the bank employees merely asked him to act less conspicuously: “Explained that as per today the bank did not interfered [sic] in his money transfer transactions,” the relevant document says, “but would have preferred to reduce those activities on a lower scale. [He] understands our concerns and will use smaller amounts.”
HSBC staff also appeared to show little concern at the description they received of a Canadian doctor, Irwin Rodier. “This client is somwhat [sic] paranoid, e.g. whenever he was coming to ZH [Zurich], he flew to Paris and hired a car to drive to ZH, in order not to re-enact his final destination etc.”
Rodier told ICIJ media partner CBC/Radio-Canada that he had since settled his taxes with Canadian authorities.
In its statement to ICIJ, HSBC said: “In the past, the Swiss private banking industry operated very differently to the way it does today. Private banks, including HSBC’s Swiss private bank, assumed that responsibility for payment of taxes rested with individual clients, rather than the institutions that banked them.”
Getting around a new law
The files show that some European customers were given advice on how to avoid a withholding tax on bank savings that came into effect in European Union countries in 2005. Switzerland had agreed to implement the tax — called the European Savings Directive, or ESD.
But the ESD pertained only to individuals, not to corporations. The files show HSBC Private Bank seized on this loophole to market products that transformed individuals into corporations for tax-reporting purposes.
The documents record that day by day throughout 2005, clients arrived in Switzerland to make cash withdrawals in British pounds, Euros, Swiss francs, U.S. dollars, and even Danish krone — sometimes asking for small used notes.
One of those being provided with cash supplies of dollars and euros was Arturo del Tiempo Marques, a property developer sentenced in 2013 to a seven-year jail sentence in Spain for smuggling cocaine. He controlled up to 19 HSBC accounts containing more than $3 million.
In one transaction, the British business tycoon Richard Caring, accompanied by security, was depicted in September 2005 collecting more than five million Swiss francs in cash.
HSBC staff explained handing Caring the huge sum of cash by quoting a statement by him that he planned to deposit the cash with another Swiss bank, and did not want either bank to be aware of the other. They wrote: “RC goes to great lengths to maintain discretion.”
A representative of Caring told The Guardian that he did not avoid taxes and that his “use of offshore funds was conducted under widely used and accepted tax principles.”
The files show Caring, a major donor to British politics, transferring $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit set up by the former U.S. President Bill Clinton with the stated mission to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.”
The donation to the Clinton Foundation was requested in December 2005. The previous month, Caring funded a champagne and caviar extravaganza at Catherine the Great’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg, Russia, flying in 450 guests to be entertained by Sir Elton John and Tina Turner and addressed by Bill Clinton. The event raised more than £11 million for a children’s charity.
A number of other prominent donors to the Clinton Foundation appear in the files, including the Canadian businessman Frank Giustra and German motor racing superstar Michael Schumacher, a seven-time Formula One champion. A representative of Schumacher, who is listed as a beneficial owner of an account closed in 2002, told ICIJ that he is a long-term resident of Switzerland.
The records show Giustra is the only person listed in an HSBC account holding more than $10 million in 2006/2007, although his role in the account is not specified
The New York Times reported in 2008 that Giustra donated to the Clinton Foundation shortly after Bill Clinton accompanied Giustra on a trip to Kazakhstan in 2005. When they landed, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who has served for decades as Kazakhstan’s president, met his two visitors over a sumptuous midnight banquet.
The Times reported that Clinton made a public declaration of support for Nazarbayev that was at odds with the stance of the U.S. government and of Clinton’s wife, then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had criticized Kazakhstan’s record on human rights. Two days later, corporate records showed, Giustra’s company won the right to buy into three state-owned uranium projects in Kazakhstan.
Both Clinton and Giustra told the Times that Giustra traveled with Clinton to Kazakhstan to see first-hand the foundation’s philanthropic work. A spokesman for Clinton told the newspaper that the former president was generally aware of Giustra’s mining interests in Kazakhstan but did nothing to help those interests.
A representative for Giustra disputed the New York Times story and said that Giustra is “in full compliance and disclosure regarding any and all bank accounts.” A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation told The Guardian it “has strong donor integrity and transparency practices that go well beyond what is required of U.S. charities, including the full disclosure of all of our donors.”
Data disappears in Greece
The data shared by French authorities with other governments is now the basis of formal investigations in several countries. French magistrates are examining whether the bank helped some clients avoid paying 2006 and 2007 taxes. French authorities have required HSBC to deposit a bail bond of €50 million. Belgian prosecutors late last year also accused the bank of tax fraud.
In August 2014, Argentine tax agents raided HSBC’s offices in Buenos Aires. The Buenos Aires Herald has reported that Argentine tax chief Ricardo Echegaray has accused HSBC of “rolling out a fraud-enabling platform” as “a maneuver to hide bank account information from tax collectors.”
HSBC said in its statement to ICIJ that it was “fully committed to the exchange of information with relevant authorities” and was “actively pursuing measures that ensure clients are tax transparent, even in advance of a regulatory or legal requirement to do so. We are also cooperating with relevant authorities investigating these matters.”
The documents raise questions about why there were investigations in some countries and not in others — and whether some investigations were less than painstaking.
For instance, some of the most extensive material relates to the bank’s U.K. clients. Initial investigations by French tax authorities identified more than 5,000 British clients linked to $61 billion in HSBC deposits — more clients and more money than from any other country.
Though the French investigators likely initially over-estimated the true amounts held by clients, the British tax office concluded that 3,600 of the 5,000 names it received from the French in 2010 were “potentially non-compliant.” A report to a House of Commons committee in September 2014 said the tax office had recovered just £135 million in back taxes from individuals on the list, compared to £220 million collected by Spain and £188 million collected by France.
Apart from isolated court cases in U.S. federal courts, it appears that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has also gone about its work quietly despite French tax investigators having identified 1,400 people with U.S. connections, holding some $16 billion. Again, that figure was higher than the amounts identified by ICIJ.
In a statement to ICIJ media partner 60 Minutes, the IRS said that since U.S. taxpayers were first encouraged to voluntarily come forward with details of their offshore holdings in 2009, “there have been more than 50,000 disclosures and we have collected more than $7 billion from this initiative alone.” The agency declined to disclose how many, if any, of those who came forward had accounts with HSBC.
What happened after France sent Greece the names of more than 2,000 Greek HSBC clients touched off a furor that now has Greece’s former finance minister facing trial.
Hot Doc magazine, which published the Lagarde list.Greece received the names in 2010, but nothing happened until October 2012, when a Greek magazine, Hot Doc, published the names and noted the lack of an investigation into whether rich Greeks were evading taxes while the country was undergoing austerity measures, including pay cuts and tax increases for those who paid.
In contrast to the reluctance with which they had gone after possible tax evasion, Greek authorities were quick to arrest Hot Doc editor Kostas Vaxevanis and charge him with violating privacy laws. He was quickly acquitted, and his trial provoked anger when two former heads of the financial police testified that neither the former finance minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou nor his successor had ordered an investigation into the list. Papakonstantinou said it had been lost.
When the list finally surfaced, it was missing the names of three relatives of Papakonstantinou. He now faces criminal charges alleging breach of trust, doctoring an official document and dereliction of duty growing out of the removal of his relatives’ names and out of his failure to act on the list when he received it.
Doing business with arms dealers
Links to arms dealing emerge repeatedly in the files obtained by ICIJ.
HSBC kept Aziza Kulsum and her family as clients even after Kulsum was named by the United Nations as financing the bloody Burundian civil war in the 1990s.
The 2001 United Nations report also said that Kulsum was a key player in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the illicit trade in coltan, a strategically important mineral used in electronic devices. A big part of the world’s supply of coltan comes from conflict zones in Central Africa, where armed factions control many mines, extort miners and profit from the sale of illegal ore.
Corday is the name on a series of accounts at HSBC and other banks that have been publicly linked to Yves Manuel who also held an account with HSBC and who died following a conviction for his role in the scandal. A French court ruling in October 2011 said Yves Manuel received and concealed $2.59 million that he knew had come from the company that disbursed bribes to French and Angolan officials. .
Yet another account can be found under the name Wang Chia-Hsing, the son of the alleged middleman in an infamous Taiwan arms deal, Andrew Wang Chuan-pu.
Wang Chuan-pu is a fugitive wanted in Taiwan over his alleged role in the murder of Taiwanese Navy Capt. Yin Ching-feng and a series of kickback and corruption scandals implicating Taiwan, France and China.
The South China Morning Post reported that Wang Chuan-pu left Taiwan shortly after the body of Yin – who was about to blow the whistle on alleged kickbacks and corruption in the navy’s purchase of six French frigates – was found floating off the island’s north coast in December 1993. Despite Chuan-pu’s death earlier this year, announced by his Swiss lawyers on 30 Jan., court cases continue in Switzerland and Taiwan.
The HSBC documents show conversations between Wang Chia-Hsing, who is described as an interior decorator and shown with an upmarket London address, and HSBC staff even during a period when the account with more than $38 million was under a court blocking order. The files do not make clear what Wang Chia-Hsing’s exact role in the account was. However, the files record that he asked the bank to recognize his non-domicile residency status in the U.K., a reference to a foreign national living in the U.K. who doesn’t pay income tax or capital gains tax on earnings abroad. It is generally regarded as a form of legal tax avoidance. The bank’s notes further indicate that a HSBC staff member was willing to backdate a form.
A representative for Wang Chia-Hsing said he has “paid all proper taxes due and has not acted in any way improperly or unlawfully.”
Diamond Traders
An analysis by ICIJ shows that almost 2,000 of HSBC clients who appear in the files are associated with the diamond industry. Among them is Emmanuel Shallop, who was subsequently convicted of dealing in blood diamonds.
Blood diamonds, or conflict diamonds, are terms used for gems mined in war zones that are later sold to finance further war. Diamonds mined during the recent civil wars in Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and other nations have been given the label.
“Diamonds have a long history of being linked to conflict and violence,” said Michael Gibb of the international human rights group Global Witness. “The ease with which diamonds can be converted into tools of war, when not sourced responsibly, is astonishing.”
The documents show that HSBC was aware that Shallop was under investigation by Belgian authorities at the time it was helping him. “We have opened a company account for him based in Dubai. … The client is very cautious currently because he is under pressure from the Belgian tax authorities, who are investigating his activities in the area of diamond fiscal fraud.”
Shallop’s lawyer told ICIJ, “We dot [sic] not want to give any comment on this issue. My client does not want his name to be mentioned in any article because of reasons of privacy.”
Other HSBC account holders can be linked to Omega Diamonds, which in 2013 settled a tax dispute in Belgium for $195 million, without admitting liability. Belgian authorities alleged in their civil suit that Omega shifted profits into Dubai by trading falsely valued diamonds from mines in Congo and Angola. During the period of these alleged transactions, the firm’s two principals, Ehud Arye Laniado and Sylvain Goldberg, each had HSBC accounts. A third Omega shareholder, Robert Liling, appears in the files as the owner of several accounts.
An attorney for the three men said none were prosecuted for tax offences. “The tax dispute between Omega Diamonds and the Belgian tax authorities involved Omega Diamonds only, neither Mr Laniado, Mr Goldberg or Mr Liling were involved in this. The Omega Diamonds tax dispute has been settled in an amicable settlement.”
Links to Al Qaeda?
HSBC’s clients’ links to Al Qaeda were first publicly raised in the July 2012 U.S. Senate report, which cited an alleged internal Al Qaeda list of financial benefactors. The Senate report said the list came to light after a search of the Bosnian offices of the Benevolence International Foundation, a Saudi-based nonprofit organization that the U.S. Treasury Department has designated as a terrorist organization.
Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, referred to the handwritten list of the 20 names as the “Golden Chain.”
From the moment the names on the Golden Chain list were made public in news reports in the spring of 2003, the Senate subcommittee stated that HSBC should have been “on notice” and aware these powerful business figures were high risk clients.
Though the significance of the Golden Chain list has since been questioned, the ICIJ found what appear to be three Golden Chain names with HSBC Swiss accounts that existed after that date.
Documents also reveal irony
People on the Most Wanted list of Interpol, the international police agency, such as the diamond dealers Mozes Victor Konig and Kenneth Lee Akselrod, are among the HSBC account holders — and so is Elias Murr, who is president of the board of Interpol’s Foundation for a Safer World, an organization aimed at fighting terrorism and organized crime. Murr, who was a prominent businessman before entering politics, was interior minister of Lebanon in 2004 when an HSBC account owned by him was held through a company called Callorford Investments Limited. By 2006-2007, the account would contain $42 million.
A spokesman for Murr said his client’s wealth and that of his family is public knowledge, and his family has held accounts in Switzerland since before he was born. The account was not connected to his political role. “It is not illegal and it is not suspicious that a Lebanese national opens and holds accounts anywhere.”
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