Accountability has always been weak in the UK, but under this government you must make spectacular efforts to lose your post. At the Leveson inquiry in May 2012, the relationship between the then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and the Murdoch empire that he was supposed to be regulating was exposed in gory detail. He was meant to be deciding impartially whether to allow the empire to take over the broadcaster BSkyB, but was secretly exchanging gleeful messages with James Murdoch and his staff.
We all knew what it meant. The emails, the Guardian observed, were likely to “sever the slim thread connecting Hunt to his cabinet job”. “After this he’s toast … it’s over for Hunt,” wrote Tom Watson MP. Ed Miliband said: “He cannot stay in his post. And if he refuses to resign, the prime minister must show some leadership and fire him.” We waited. Hunt remained culture secretary for another four months, then he was promoted to secretary of state for health.
A real Mr Green – Stephen, this time – was ennobled by David Cameron and appointed, democratically of course, as minister for trade and investment. In July 2012, a US Senate committee reported that while Lord Green was chief executive and chairman of HSBC, the bank’s compliance culture was “pervasively polluted”. Its branches had “actively circumvented US safeguards … designed to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords and rogue regimes”.
Billions of dollars from Mexican drug barons, from Iran and from “obviously suspicious” travellers’ cheques “benefiting Russians who claimed to be in the used car business” sluiced through its tills. Out went dollars and financial services to banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh linked to the financing of terrorists. The Guardian reported that HSBC “continued to operate hundreds of accounts with suspected links to Mexican drug cartels, even after Green and fellow executives were told by regulators that HSBC was one of the worst banks for money laundering.”
Green refused to answer questions and sat tight. He remained in post for another 17 months, until he gracefully retired in December 2013.
#G4S #Murdoch #BSkyB #outsourcing #HSBC #drugcartels #SaudiArabia #AtosHealthcare