Still trouble for Hsbc Private Bank. The British bank's Swiss branch has been charged in Belgium with serious organized tax fraud and money laundering. The judges of the Brussels public prosecutor's office stated this today, underlining that the institute is suspected of having “deliberately helped hundreds of customers, especially diamond merchants in Antwerp, to evade taxes. The damage to the Belgian state generated by these practices is estimated at several hundred million euros,” reads the public prosecutor's statement. The bank was also accused of setting up an organization for the illegal practice of financial intermediation.
A few days ago HSBC, along with other institutions such as JP Morgan and Citibank, was sentenced to pay a fine by both the US and English authorities, for an affair relating to the manipulation of exchange rates, which cost the 5 banks indicted, including HSBC, the sum of 2,5 billion euros .
