UPDATED: February 28, 2011 – Tremendous interest in this article by Bajans
Swiss Regulator “symbolically” reprimands HSBC over data theft.
Barbados Government continues to ignore HSBC Private Bank Money Laundering & Tax Haven Scandal
We are again seeing tremendous interest in this Barbados Free Press article with thousands of hits coming from all over the world. It turns out that the Swiss financial regulator has just taken a piece out of the HSBC hide – well, at least made a “symbolic” reprimand according to the news.
But it’s really all for show folks. Some of the laundered money came through Barbados, but no investigations or prosecutions will be done by Barbados. Too right!
First Update: October 2, 2010…
As the workweek winds down, Friday is usually a slower day at Barbados Free Press in terms of visitors. That didn’t seem to matter yesterday though when almost 5,000 Barbadians took the time to click upon and read this article fully – showing the tremendous interest that voters still have in knowing where their money went over the last 20 years.
During the 2007 election campaign and continuing for the first 3 months after winning, the DLP and David Thompson promised to address the issue of BLP government corruption and offshore money transfers by BLP government officials and friends. That promise died about April of 2008 and became a total non-subject by 2009 as the DLP piggies at the trough decided that they had better not throw any stones while living in glass houses themselves.
The high Bajan readership on this article shows that voters haven’t forgotten the issue of their tax dollars spirited away to offshore accounts.
A little bit of HSBC information released before the next election could be an important event in Bajan politics, given what the mood of the public will be after a few more years of financial downturn and unemployment.
Here’s our original article that is drawing so much interest from people living in Barbados…
Rogue employee exposes 80,000+ HSBC Private Bank clients. How many from Barbados?
A list of 80,000+ foreign client Swiss bank accounts is in the hands of the French government – who are sharing the take with tax authorities in other countries. It appears that 99% of the offshore accounts are unreported to the clients’ home countries.
“There were 8,000 accounts on the list that belonged to French citizens, and only two accounts had been declared for tax purposes.” *
“More than 1,700 private offshore bank accounts belonging to Canadians turned up on a list of secret accounts in Switzerland.” *
In 2006, Herve Falciani, head of computer security at HSBC, started downloading (read “stealing”) the detailed data of 80,000 foreign clients of HSBC’s Private Bank in Geneva, Switzerland. These are serious accounts that take at least US$500,000 to open, but that’s the lowest.
“We’re talking billions of dollars held in secret Swiss accounts – and you know that some of that must have come through Bridgetown.” Continue reading
Barbados Free Press 