The bank who likes to say 'Yes'.

So it is being alleged that HSBC helps its clients to tax dodge, or issues over outstanding loans made by HSBC to the Labour Party; yet why is there any real surprise when the sordid history of HSBC is openly available to all with a little internet research.

In short HSBC's original role was to launder opium income on behalf of Jardine Matheson and other importers of the drug into China. These companies then bankrolled the Chinese Triad gang lords they created and controlled to protect and deal in said opium, funded via the HSBC.

Apparently HSBC and its backers in Jardine Matheson, Sutherlands, Lehmann's, Rothschilds, P&O and other 19th century opium importers and Chinese forced labour exporters to the USA and Australia (it is where the term to be 'Shanghaied' comes from) put up the money to back Chiang Kai Shek (who was a boss in the Triads) as ruler of China from 1927 onwards, via HSBC. In 1921 Ghandi was jailed in India, by the British Raj, for opposing the continuing export of Indian grown opium to China on the grounds stopping the 'trade' would undermine India's revenue and trade with China.

HSBC were the conduit through which funds reached the Confederate State during the US Civil War as they laundered the money for the Southern cotton producers from their blockade running activities and gave lines of credit to the 'South'. Then there is the cruel irony of the Rothschilds and Lehmann's gaining even more wealth from illicit HSBC trading in Nazi gold, confiscated from German Jewry in the 1930's and 40's.

As late as the 1970's HSBC was still laundering opium income through Hong Kong to fund and arm the hill tribes in the Vietnam Highlands in their struggle against the Vietnamese Communists, on behalf of the CIA. No doubt HSBC would also have had a role laundering money from Afghan opium for the CIA / MI6 during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the early 1980's to fund Bin Laden and other 'freedom fighters'. HSBC clearly likes to say 'Yes' to barely legal but highly profitable deals which need hushed up. 

HSBC have a long tradition of looking after their client's best interests, they have been helping clients 'tax dodge' and defraud Governments across the globe since the mid 19th Century when the bank was founded - after all, it was part of its original 'raison d'etre'.