Tories tainted by tax scandal

Revelations that bank HSBC helped clients to evade tax are embarrassing for the Conservatives. Emily Hohler reports.

Bank records leaked to the media suggest that the Swiss arm of HSBC helped clients to conceal assets and evade taxes. Several thousand British customers who stored $21.7bn in Swiss accounts are included in the probe (although many of them may not have done anything wrong). The revelations are embarrassing for the Tories, since Stephen Green who was chief executive and chairman of HSBC at the time was subsequently given a peerage and a ministerial job by David Cameron.

Downing Street claims that the bank's activities were "not widely known" at the time of Lord Green's appointment, says Rachel Sylvester in The Times.That doesn't wash: "the government was told about them eight months before". The former Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson insists that Green "should have known what was going on". This "tit-for-tat tiff" is not helpful for the government.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.