A man with vast quantities of stolen bank data sent the above email to the HMRC in 2008 possibly fishing for a payment to release the data to the tax authorities.
The Foreign Secretary in 2008, David Miliband, also received the same email direct to his office. Why are there no questions about that?
The BBC and the Guardian set the hounds running when they cobbled together a story about HSBC and whipped it up into a feeding frenzy. Which is odd really as the story is at least 5 years old and perhaps as much as 7 years.
As the story fitted in snugly with Labour’s election attack on tax evaders and narrative of Tories protecting their millionaire friends you might conclude that this was timed perfectly to fit into Labour’s election campaign….and just because Labour announced that it planned to attack tax evaders only a few days previously to the HSBC story resurfacing does not provide evidence of any collusion on the part of the BBC with the Labour Party. It just doesn’t look good does it?
The fact that this BBC report misses out or downplays two essential facts that undermine Labour’s narrative is neither here nor there…..
HSBC whistleblower: There are ‘more revelations’
He came across as credible, assured and clear in what he is trying to achieve.
Nothing less than a “battle against secrecy”.
And now Herve Falciani has revealed that far from this week being the end of the story, there is still plenty of information that is likely to come out about HSBC.
So we have a ‘whistleblower’ who is ‘credible’ and in a ‘battle against secrecy’….could do no better than start with the BBC itself then I suppose.
But he wasn’t a ‘whistleblower’ he was a thief out to make money from the data theft….he tried to sell the data to other banks and it isn’t unknown for governments to pay for stolen data such as this.
The BBC mentions this in passing but allows Falciani to dismiss it uncallenged…
Critics of Mr Falciani – and there are many – say he is a whistleblower who comes with a health warning.
They say he stole the HSBC data when he worked at the bank and originally hawked the information around for money.
He denies both allegations.
“It is wrong,” he said. “They try to kill your reputation, like the mafia. It is already starting to be proved to be wrong.
Then we get onto the emails he sent to the UK in 2008….or email as the BBC here reports…
The BBC has seen an email obtained by Le Monde that Mr Falciani sent in 2008 to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
It offered details of clients in what was described as a large private bank in Switzerland.
He told me that HMRC did not respond, despite a follow up phone call to the tax evasion hotline.
The BBC says…
There are now questions about why HMRC didn’t respond and why it has taken so long for the information to become public.
What the BBC report makes no mention of is the same email was sent to the Foreign Office which also denies having received it….and yet the BBC does not mention that here…nor do they raise any questions as to why the Foreign Office didn’t respond to the email…that’s the Foreign Office run by Labour then in office…
It’s not as if the BBC don’t know such an email was sent….in another report they admit that…
The email addressed to the private office of the foreign secretary followed exactly the same format.
An FCO spokesperson said: “We have checked our systems and have no record of receiving this email.”
But even in this second report the BBC still then ignores the obvious questions about the email sent to Labour’s Foreign Secretary and instead asks merely about the one sent to the HMRC…
The UK tax authority has been under fire from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, who accused tax officials of failing to deal with the matter adequately and ignoring Mr Falciani’s 2008 email.
During a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday, Lin Homer, head of HMRC, was questioned forcefully over whether the tax authorities had received a communication regarding HSBC’s tax arrangements.
Ms Homer said she had “no knowledge” of an email in 2008.
A spokesperson from HM Revenue and Customs said on Thursday: “HMRC has not found a record of receiving an email or any phone call from Mr Falciani in 2008.
Why is Labour’s Foreign Secretary not ‘under fire’ from the BBC and indeed Labour’s own Margaret Hodge, head of the Public Accounts Committee?
Who you might ask was Foreign Secreatry in 2008?
Ed Miliband’s brother…
Just a bit awkward for Labour eh?
Not at all awkward for Labour. It will not be widely reported in the manner it would be had there been a Conservative Foreign Secretary involved. In that case it would be headline news for days.
We need Fox News in this country.