“There's nothing necessarily illegal about setting up a company in Panama into which you channel your bonus payments. There's similarly nothing inherently dubious about living in Hong Kong, having Hong Kong citizenship, and opening a Swiss bank account to store some of your wealth. But when you're the chief executive of a British bank embroiled in a scandal about helping customers dodge taxes by hiding money in its Swiss private-wealth unit, it sure looks bad.
HSBC Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver oversees Europe's biggest bank by market value, a global banking behemoth that's celebrating its 150th birthday this year. There's not much cause for celebration in the bank's results published today, however, or in the various wrongdoings regulators around the world have found it guilty of. And the timing of the latest revelations about Gulliver's personal banking arrangements come at a tricky time; the bank's chairman Douglas Flint has been summoned by members of Parliament to testify to the Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday about his time as finance director.”
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