Minister of Finance, Michael Noonan, has stood over his appointment of the former HBSC boss Michael Geoghegan as the chair of the advisory board to NAMA.
Geoghegan was the CEO of HSBC between 2006 and 2010. This was the time when the bank was facilitating tax evasion on a vast scale by the global rich.
About €4 billion of Irish money was stashed away in the Swiss branch for this very purpose.
Geoghegan has played a key role in NAMA and issued a report on its ‘governance’. He advised the agency to seek greater independence from government control and to appoint additional executive directors. He argued that NAMA should be more ‘entrepreneurial ‘even if this was not immediately popular’. One of the key reasons was, he suggested, that NAMA had to find more ‘creative means’ of disposing of assets.
Geoghegan’s advice was accepted by NAMA and shortly afterwards it began a programme of selling off large chunks of property to global vulture funds. To facilitate this massive sell off, Noonan introduced a special tax concession that would allow Real Estate Investment Trusts to buy up large swathes of Irish property.
One result of this type of advice is that hardly any of NAMA's huge portfolio of property has been used to house those on waiting lists or make property available for wider social uses.
By continuing to defend Geoghegan, Noonan is signalling that Ireland has a nod and wink culture to tax dodging. After all, if the world’s chief facilitator of the practice is a key state advisor, why should anyone worry that they will get any more than a rap on the knuckles for robbing the Irish exchequer of funds. In other words, Ireland will operate a philosophy that ‘taxes are for the little people'.
This attitude is evident in the failure of the Irish authorities to bring charges against HSBC. France and Belgium have started to do just this after a whistleblower, Herve Falcani, who worked in the company’s IT department handed over files to French authorities in 2007. These files were then available to other revenue authorities around the world shortly afterwards. The Irish state authorities knew exactly who they were getting when they made Geoghegan chief advisor to NAMA.
During his reign as HSBC’s chief executive, the bank was involved in some of the following activities:
- They laundered money from Mexican drug cartels and were subsequently fined €2 billion by US authorities.
- They opened an account for Emmanuel Shallop, subsequently convicted of dealing in African blood diamonds. An internal bank memo noted that the Belgian tax authorities were “investigating his activities in the field of diamond tax evasion”
- They set up their Swiss bank as a major operation for tax dodging.
- They provided large, untraceable amounts of cash in foreign currencies to clients and colluded with them to conceal “black” accounts from tax authorities, which could be damaging for the bank
- They issued credit cards drawn on the Swiss bank account to help their rich clients have easy access to their tax dodging accounts.
- They gave code names to the tax dodgers such as Captain Kirk, Painter and Haddock.
- HSBC knew they were dealing directly with criminals and tax dodgers. Notes in various client files state that accounts were “undeclared” in their country of origin.
Irish involvement with HSBC, however, does not stop with Geoghegan. Until last year, the government appointed chairperson of AIB bank was none other than David Hodgkinson. He ran the Middle East operation of HSBC where he helped to launder Iranian money into the bank vaults. A US report into the activities of the bank stated that Hodgkinson asked Geoghegan for his ‘intervention and support’.
With these two characters at the top of the political-finance nexus in Ireland, is it any wonder that the country is seen as the Atlantic tax haven?
If you agree and wish to get involved with People Before Profit, text JOIN to 087 2839964
People Before Profit