February 11, 2015
By John Gapper
...So what is the term (click here) for sullying profits from legal enterprise with tax evasion and shenanigans? Money staining, perhaps.
That question came to mind this week when reading about the 30,000 clients of HSBC’s Swiss private bank in the mid-2000s. Some were apparently avoiding domestic taxes;
others were behaving lawfully but very oddly, emerging from its branch
in Geneva holding cases of used banknotes. The activity was not black
but nor was it entirely white: there were various shades of grey....
...Spare
a thought for the billionaire, whose life is in some respects more
challenging than ours. The property story of the week, amid those in Le
Monde and The Guardian about HSBC, and a New York Times series about foreigners buying apartments on Central Park, was how Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, came to acquire all of the property around his house....
When the few hold all the money in the world do banks have a choice in the way it's services are used?
