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HSBC

Norwegian hid $300m in secret Swiss account

A single client associated with Norway had $293.4m parked in a Swiss bank account with the international banking giant HSBC, new ‘Swiss Leaks’ data has revealed, more than all the other Norwegian clients with secret accounts at the bank combined.

Norwegian hid $300m in secret Swiss account
The HSBC building at Canary Wharf. Photo: Elliott Brown/Flickr
The Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), along with an international coalition of newspapers, on Sunday published a searchable database of data from the 2007 leak. 
 
The published data shows that 115 clients "associated with Norway" had together stashed some  $457.6m at the bank in 314 separate accounts in the bank, presumably aiming to escape the Norwegian taxman. Of those 45 percent had a Norwegian passport or nationality. 
 
This was less than any other country in Western Europe apart from Finland and Iceland, somewhat surprisingly given the country's ample crop of oil and shipping billionaires. 
 
The neighbouring Danes had squirrelled away $700m at the bank, while the Swedes had put away nearly $1bn.  The top European nationalities, the Swiss, the British, and the French, had hidden $31.2bn, $21.7bn and $12.7bn respectively in the bank's Swiss division.  
 
The mystery Norwegian was not among the 61 prominent figures named in the data published on Sunday, who included businessmen, politicians as well as celebrities such as Christian Slater, Elle Macpherson, Phil Collins, and Swedish footballer  Andreas Andersson. 
 
This could be because the account was one of the roughly 30 percent of Norway-linked accounts which was linked only to a number. Approximately 50 percent were linked to named individuals with the remainder linked to "offshore entities".  
 
According to Aftenposten, Norway’s Tax Administration now plans to request that Switzerland provide it with the leaked data so that it can ascertain if any of those holding accounts have broken Norwegian law. 
 
According to the newspaper, it is not illegal to have money in a secret Swiss bank account, meaning many of the 111 Norwegians clients may not have broken the law. 
 
Described as the biggest banking leak in history, the information includes details of 30,000 accounts with total assets of around $120 billion.
 
The documents, which cover a period up to 2007 when they were stolen by Hervé Falciani, a former IT worker at HSBC in Geneva, who fled to France.
 
The ICIJ has been analysing the data since September 2014. 
 

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BUSINESS

HSBC to pay France €300million to avoid tax fraud trial

HSBC Private Bank, a Swiss unit of banking giant HSBC, has agreed to pay 300 million euros ($352 million) to avoid going to trial in France for enabling tax fraud, prosecutors said Tuesday.

HSBC to pay France €300million to avoid tax fraud trial
Photo: AFP

HSBC was accused last year of helping French clients to hide at least 1.67 billion euros from the tax authorities, according to a source close to the probe.

The deal struck between the financial crime prosecutor's office and the bank is a first in France under a new procedure that allows companies under
suspicion of corruption or dissimulation of tax fraud to negotiate a fine to stop a case from going to trial.

The deal does not include a guilty plea.

French prosecutors have now dropped the case against HSBC Holdings.

The case against HSBC was opened back in 2015 and was over an alleged global tax-dodging scheme that helped hundreds of French nationals and pothers around the world evade the tax man.

Investigators believe that HSBC's private banking division offered its customers several ways of hiding assets from the French taxman, notably via the use of offshore tax havens.

The banking giant was at first accused of failing in its supervisory role over its private banking division, but further investigation led to suspicions
that HSBC “participated actively in the fraudulent practices”, the source close to the investigation said.

The probe named the former chief executive of the bank's Swiss private banking arm, Peter Braunwalder, and another executive, Judah Elmaleh.

The case began when French authorities in late 2008 received files stolen by Herve Falciani, a former HSBC employee, whose disclosures sparked the so-called “Swissleaks” scandal on bank-supported tax evasion.

The French-Italian national — dubbed by some media as “The Edward Snowden of banking” — leaked a cache of documents allegedly indicating that HSBC helped more than 120,000 clients of a number of nationalities to hide 180.6 billion euros from tax authorities between November 2006 and March 2007.

He was sentenced in absentia in November in Switzerland to five years in prison. The leaked files led to investigations by tax authorities in several European countries including, in addition to France, Spain and Belgium.