UK government should have known about HSBC tax issues, says Falciani

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/12/hsbc-uk-government-should-have-known-tax-issues-falciani

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Hervé Falciani, the whistleblower at the centre of the HSBC leaks, has said the British government should have known about widespread tax avoidance and evasion at the bank’s Swiss subsidiary in 2010.

The computer specialist behind the biggest banking data leak in history said by then that the information he had stolen was in the public domain.

“By that time I had already declared and explained the problems that were happening and of course it was already available for all the departments of justice that were asking that, so it would have been very easy for them to obtain,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday. “Names, also relationships, contracts, transactions … and history. All this was available.”

Related: HSBC files: minister defends government over pursuing tax avoiders

Falciani began surreptitiously extracting client data from inside HSBC’s Swiss arm in 2006-07. Arrested and released in Geneva in 2008, he fled to France with information on 30,000 accounts, holding almost $120bn (£78bn) of assets. Many of the accounts belonged to prominent figures in business, film, music and sport, and the heads of royal families. The tax authorities seized the data in 2008.

Britain’s most senior tax official told MPs on Wednesday she was confident that civil servants alerted ministers in 2010 about the leak that uncovered avoidance and evasion on an industrial scale at HSBC Suisse.

Lin Homer, chief executive of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), made the disclosure at a bad-tempered public accounts committee hearing, during which her department was accused of failing to serve British taxpayers’ interests.

Homer, who was appointed to lead the tax authority in 2012, said she believed officials would have told government ministers within months of receiving the data in April 2010. “We are confident we will have told ministers that we were about to receive a big tranche of operation information,” she said.

A key question in the HSBC political firestorm centres on which, if any, ministers were made aware of the claims and whether they were acted upon.

Seeking to pile the political pressure on David Cameron, Labour has demanded to know why the government signed up to a tax deal with Switzerland in 2012 that included a commitment that the UK would “not actively seek to acquire customer data stolen from Swiss banks”.

Labour’s Treasury spokeswoman, Shabana Mahmood, said: “George Osborne personally trumpeted this Swiss tax deal in his 2012 autumn statement. He must now come clean and explain why he signed off an agreement with the Swiss authorities which tied HMRC’s hands for the future.

“This deal means that the government may never again be able to get hold of the sort of information it received in 2010 about tax evasion and which is at the centre of this scandal. This deal was made while Lord Green was a Tory minister and years after this government was first given this evidence of tax evasion.”

Cameron refused four times at a rowdy prime minister’s questions on Wednesday to tell MPs whether he had ever discussed the evidence of tax evasion and avoidance at the bank’s Swiss subsidiary with Green, the former HSBC chairman.

Falciani also told Sky News that he had emailed and phoned the tax authorities two years before data was handed over to the UK by the French authorities in 2010.

“I sent an email, a very naive email, in 2008 ... to England – to the department dedicated to tax evasion – and afterwards I even called them,” he said.

“And finally the most efficient move was through the French authorities because when we accepted to work together, it was established and agreed that what we were doing should be available to any countries having cooperation treaties signed with France.”