The two top HSBC bosses have rejected calls for them to quit over the bank’s Swiss tax scandal, but said they were cleaning up after a “terrible list” of control and compliance failings.
Stuart Gulliver, group chief executive, said it had caused “damage to trust and confidence” in the company.
He and chairman Douglas Flint were answering questions from UK Members of Parliament of the Treasury Committee.
Mr Flint said he felt shame and would “take his share of responsibility”.
But when asked by MPs who was most responsible for the problems in HSBC’s Swiss private bank, Mr Flint said: “The individuals most accountable for the data theft and the behaviour that was unacceptable to our standards, was the management in Switzerland.
“Most culpable were the relationship managers [in the Swiss private bank].”
Mr Flint estimated that some 30 per cent of those relationship managers were still employed by HSBC.
Information about some 30,000 accounts at the Swiss private bank operation was leaked in 2007 to French tax authorities who passed it on to the UK tax authorities (HMRC).
It adds to a long list of banking scandals that have emerged since the financial crisis, including several at HSBC. The bank was fined $1.9 billion two years ago by U.S. authorities for lax controls that allowed criminals to launder money and was also hit with a $611 million penalty by regulators in November for alleged manipulation of currency markets.
“It’s a terrible list,” Flint said when a UK member of parliament read out the recent fines and investigations.
He said the bank was more than halfway through a transformation to make it simpler and create more central control. “I sincerely hope there are no more skeletons,” Flint added.
Former director of public prosecutions Lord Ken Macdonald QC said last week that there was sufficient evidence for the bank to be investigated for conspiracy to defraud the UK tax authorities.
However, Jennie Granger, director general enforcement and compliance at HMRC told the Treasury committee: “What we had was intelligence, not evidence. It was stolen data, its quality was not good…. and we were dealing with a jurisdiction that would not accept stolen data as evidence.”
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