UK's Treasury Committee scrutinising HSBC

Amisha Mehta

23 February 2015

HSBC's chairman, Douglas Flint, and the chief executive of HM Revenue & Customs, Lin Homer, are expected to give evidence. Details of the hearing are yet to be finalised. The committee, according to its chairman Andrew Tyrie, is concerned about allegations involving HSBC and its Swiss private bank. It will, along with the apportionment of blame, try to determine whether private banks had taken sufficient steps to improve their practices.

HSBC is telling everybody that it has moved on from the business model that it had before 2008, to which a mountain of allegations, already covered in our web-pages, relate.

The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has also been swept up in the media storm after its chief executive, Martin Wheatley, admitted knowing nothing of the HSBC scandal up until three weekends ago. Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs was given a leaked file of the Swiss private bank's account holders in 2010.

“The committee will also examine whether part of the banks' apparent ‘solution’ – de-risking – may have created another problem, that of unreasonably denying customers access to banking services,” said Tyrie.