Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren is asking a representative of the Washington Government about financial issues in the United States Parliament. “[In December 2012] HSBC acknowledges having bleached 881 million black dollars to drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico (...). It has not been a mistake, they have repeated it over years, and they have taken them. The HSBC has paid the fine, but one of its officials has not been sued, nobody has been prevented from working in the banking sector, nor has it been proposed to ban the work of that entity in EE.UU. That’s why I ask you, a money laundering expert, how many millions of dollars do you have to justify the drug chiefs and how many economic sanctions have been passed on so that the authorities decide to close your business?”

In March 2013, he asked David Cohen in defense of Elizabeth Warren's U.S. Government. The recording is available on Youtube. The senator then compared the harsh sentences applied to small drug dealers with the impunity of bankers who bleach the millions who move them. Why will it be?

Belgian Eric Toussaint, auditor of unfair debts and transparency of financial institutions, replied: the problem is not that a stolen bank such as the HSBC has not stolen enough, but on the contrary, it has become too heavy: Organizations like HSBC cannot be punished for being “Too Big To Fail”, too big to let them fail.

Toussaint wrote to the analysis written a year ago on the website of the Third World Debt Destruction Commission (CADTM): “Les barons de la banque et de la drogue” (Employers of banks and drugs). No one has sued the Belgian economist, no one has sued HSBC. There was absolute silence.

The key, for Toussain, is in the connections with the political powers. It is not a theoretical link, it goes beyond the denunciation that can be called demagogy in the acts of protest. Toussain gives him his first name and last name: “Stephen Green, HSBC Patron (2003-2010) Ministre britannique du Commerce (2011-2013), une figure emblématique”.

The banker and politician Stephen Keith Green (1948) represents the symbiosis between finance and politics. As if it were not enough, before being a minister of government he is also a priest of the Anglican Church of England. He has taught lessons in two books about the relationship between business and ethics. It is good to know how to serve the same thing to God and Caesar without moral reproaches.

In his youth, Green worked as a diplomat at the Ministry of Colonies. He then consulted McKinsey. He was signed by the HSBC in 1982 and won the degrees in a short time. In 2003 he was appointed Executive Director of the bank, a position he held between 2006 and 2010, a position he held until 2010. That same year, he was named Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint in the House of Lords, a lifelong senator. From 2011 to 2013 he has been Minister of Trade and Innovation in the Government of David Cameron as Prime Minister.

Drugs and empire

But before he got to minister, Stephen Green, who was the president of the bank, was accused of laundering the money from drug trafficking. In 2005, Bloomberg, from New York, reported that it was dedicated to this HSBC. In 2008, the United States Government notified Green that Mexico had denounced that a HSBC delegation was involved in the illegalization of crime money. Following repeated warnings, the Washington authorities finally imposed a fine of $1.9 billion on Russian passengers in 2012.

According to Toussain, “Stephen Green was well placed to know what was happening in Mexico, in the tax havens, in the Middle East and in the EE.UU, as he had acted before being the HSBC’s top leader at the HSBC (known tax haven), Mexico and the Middle East.”

Sniffing the movements of the U.S. authorities, he jumped early from the corsario bank to the ground... Refuge in the port of London. He was named lord in 2010 and in 2012 was captured by the fine to HSBC in the government of David Cameron in the United States. “Read this in a black police novel and you would say the writer’s hand has gone a little further,” says Toussain.

In addition to the role of government, Green has in recent years occupied the leadership of the industrial employers and the negotiations for the organisation of the Olympic Games in London. David Cameron has never allowed Green to ask about HSBC in Lord's room: Lord Green has done a great deal of work within the government to strengthen British exports and to bring about, notably, the new treaty between the European Union and the United States (known as TTIP). To promote the export of arms produced by the British.

Stepehn Green has personified in his head what has been the HSBC for the British Empire. Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), which today employs 260,000 workers and 54 million customers in 75 countries around the world, is linked to international drug trade.

The British, supported by Washington, won two wars to China, the second between 1856-1860, both with opium at the root. Since the English oppressed her, China has suffered a great deal of exclusion for a century and a half.

In exchange for peace, China, a humiliated loser, had had to accept that all the free opium it wanted from India, then the British empire, could be introduced. The HSBC was founded in 1865 by a Scottish trader specialising in the opium trade.

On the return of Hong Kong to China, the HSBC headquarters was transferred to London in 1993. But true to their history, the authorities have once again found drug traffickers, in the manipulation of exchange rates, in the fraud of interest rate derivatives, in the fraud of false insurance for small businesses, in the manipulation of the prices of gold and silver ... and in the scandal that during these weeks has become the world’s main spectacle: mass fraud to avoid taxes.

Toussaint: “The British HSBC embodies the doctrine ‘too big to fall into prison’.” So far, that has been the case. Same in 2015?