Hsbc

Naturally, when George Osborne and Ed Balls squared up in the Commons this afternoon for a showdown on the HSBC tax row, it wasn’t a particularly pretty affair. There was shouting, heckling, yowling – and the backbenchers were pretty aerated, too. Indeed, the Tories had turned up intending to throw the Shadow Chancellor off pace before he’d even started, shouting ‘ANSWER’ at him every time he tried to say a single word. Balls had clearly turned up thinking that dragging the Chancellor to the Commons to answer his urgent question was victory enough. But an urgent question is only a victory if the minister responding leaves the Chamber thinking that

Presumably as a way of getting out of an endless debate about receipts, Ed Balls has issued a letter with some detailed questions about tax evasion and HSBC (as opposed to tax avoidance and window cleaners). The letter asks three questions: 1. Why has there only been one prosecution out of 1,100 names? Was the “selective prosecution policy” a decision made by Ministers? 2. When were you first made aware of these files, what action did you take and did you discuss it with the Prime Minister? 3. Why did you and David Cameron appoint Lord Green as a Conservative peer and Minister months after the government received these files?

The great historian of the Soviet Union Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics reads: ‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.’ I have tested Conquest’s law on every bureaucracy I have covered, and it has always held up: nowhere more so than in the case of the British Conservative Party. The only way to explain it is to assume that agents of the Left, determined to lead it to destruction, have seized its leadership. The Conservatives are entering a tight election with one heavy burden. The public see them as the party of

Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a rather Olympian, out-of-the-ordinary figure at HSBC. This was a bank that traditionally drew its top men from a corps of tough, non-intellectual, front-line overseas bankers typified by the chairmen before Green, Sir John Bond and Sir Willie Purves. As the dominant bank in Hong Kong and a market leader throughout Asia and the Middle East, it was habituated to dealing with customers who took big risks, hoarded cash when they had it, and did not necessarily regard paying tax as a civic duty. But if ethics were rarely discussed in

Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a rather Olympian, out-of-the-ordinary figure at HSBC. This was a bank that traditionally drew its top men from a corps of tough, non-intellectual, front-line overseas bankers typified by the chairmen before Green, Sir John Bond and Sir Willie Purves. As the dominant bank in Hong Kong and a market leader throughout Asia and the Middle East, it was habituated to dealing with customers who took big risks, hoarded cash when they had it, and did not necessarily regard paying tax as a civic duty. But if ethics were rarely discussed in

The Swiss list, or swizz list, dominated PMQs. Ed Miliband was keen to paint Cameron as the beneficiary of ‘dodgy’ donors who craftily side-stepped their tax bills and funnelled the proceeds back to Tory HQ. The stink also enveloped Stephen Green, given a peerage by Cameron, who ran HSBC at a time when it helped millionaires to, let us say, ‘overlook their obligations to the Treasury’. Nine years back it was even suggested, by Bloomberg, that the bank had stooped to money laundering while Green was in charge. Nonsense, said his friends, the money wasn’t being laundered, just given a rinse and a whizz over with the iron. In the

The HSBC tax dodge leak is from 2007, and so has nothing to do with the current government, sort of. Ministers have been defending the appointment of Stephen Green as trade minister. Green was boss at HSBC during the period that this leak relates to. But given Labour is trying to increase the political temperature on tax avoidance at the moment, the Tories have also been quite keen this morning to suggest that Ed Balls has questions to answer on this story, to be broadcast on Panorama tonight. Earlier this morning Financial Secretary to the Treasury David Gauke released this statement: ‘It is for HSBC to explain what they did