Posts written by Vninect

In his most surprising admission, Sir David [the new boss] said that "in principle" he favours charging for bank accounts and services, arguing that had fees been in place the bank might have avoided some of the recent mis-selling in the UK industry.

He branded recent mis-selling episodes, such as interest rate swaps to small companies and payment protection insurance, as "the consequence of not charging for bank accounts".

"Because banks are not charging, it drives them inexorably into this sort of position," he said.

You think banks plan for long term???

Richard Murphy has once again cut through the "big words" to get to the heart of the issue of tax. This is an area where language is used very effectively to obscure the issues, and to make the indefensible appear quite reasonable. It can be difficult to sort out what we are actually talking about as the debate slides between tax evasion;tax avoidance; and tax planning. Mr Murphy makes plain the distinction between avoidance and planning here:

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cEnmUyxpU

This is perhaps more convincing as a klezmer fusion piece, however

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cEnmUyxpU

there were 250 banks registered there that had assets of US$1.78 trillion, including 40 of the world’s biggest 50 banks.

17,000: The backlog of unreviewed, potentially suspicious activity alerts at HSBC’s U.S. arm as uncovered by government regulators in 2010.

200: Number of compliance staff in bank’s U.S. branch between 2006 and 2009, of which a smaller group was charged with making sure the bank was following anti-money-laundering rules. HBUS had millions of accounts, and more than 16,000 employees overall, and according to the report, kept compliance staff small as a cost-cutting measure.Members of the anti-money-laundering group told investigators that understaffing was a key problem.

85: Number of problems with the anti-money-laundering efforts at bank’s U.S. arm red-flagged by the OCC between 2005 and 2010. That was a third more than the next-closest major bank.

0: number of enforcement actions the OCC took in that time period.

3: number of years, from 2006 to 2009, for which HSBC’s U.S. branch didn’t do anymoney-laundering monitoring for transactions with HSBC banks in other countries.

15 billion: Total value of U.S. dollar bills (as in paper money) the bank accepted as part of bulk-cash transactions from foreign HSBC banks during that period, with no anti money-laundering controls.

Concerns About HBMX, the Bank’s Mexican Arm

7 Billion: U.S. dollars exported from 2007-2008 from HBMX accounts to HSBC’s U.S. accounts. At the time, both American and Mexican officials raised concerns that such a volume was only possible if it included illegal drug money.

1: Rank of HBMX in repatriation of U.S. dollars from Mexico for those years. HBMX is only the 5th largest bank in Mexico.

50,000: Number of clients in 2008 with U.S. dollar accounts at an HBMX shell operation in the Cayman Islands.

75: Estimated percentage of those accounts for which HBMX had incomplete information on the account holder.

15: Estimated percentage of such accounts for which the bank had no account holder information. (In 2009, HBMX closed 9,000 Cayman U.S. dollar accounts, but continues to allow new ones to be opened there).

Read more: http://www.minyanville.com/sectors/financi...3#ixzz21Hxi9BgA

Seems that the concessions granted to corporate sponsors of the Olympics has gone further than I thought imaginable. Interesting article from the Spectator which outlines some of this

www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/pol...olympic-censors