HSBC’s French clients stashed as much as US$5 billion of undeclared assets between November 2005 and February 2007 in the bank’s Swiss unit, according to a report published by French lawmakers.
The report said that France needs to strengthen its methods of fighting tax evasion and examined why it took French authorities more than four years to begin an investigation after receiving leaked data on clients at HSBC’s Swiss arm.
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The country has started a formal investigation into HSBC in April 2013, over whether it sold products designed to avoid French tax.
The process of extracting the names from that client list is known as ‘Operation Chocolate’.
France collected EUR186 million in taxes by mid-June from the "regularization" of EUR950 million in offshore holdings, according to French Parliament member, Christian Eckert.
Eckert investigated the accounts of 2,932 clients at London-based HSBC’s Swiss unit, including the names of 169 people classified as HSBC employees who may have helped with tax evasion.
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By GlobalData"The HSBC affair is an example of some banks’ practices deliberately helping their clients defrauds the tax authorities," Eckert said.
"The case of the HSBC list has shed light on the weaknesses in our legal arsenal in the fight against systematic tax fraud," he added.
Eckert’s findings were based on the data provided by Herve Falciani, a former Geneva-based HSBC software technician accused by the bank of stealing data.
The report described a variety of legal, technical, diplomatic and procedural issues that began when Falciani gave data to the French tax authorities in December 2008.
On 9 June 2013, Swiss Court has ruled that the government can transfer the bank records of an American client of Credit Suisse to the US tax authorities.
On 16 Apr 2013, PBI reported that Ex-HSBC employee ch.arged with confidential information leak about private Swiss accounts.
