Perhaps you are right about the choice of words. I must confess to being very uncomfortable about this whistleblowing thing – as I understand it in this case an employee of HSBC for whatever reason(s) (e.g. failed to get promoted, doesn’t like how they do business, bored, cheesed off, doesn’t like his boss, got ditched by a lover, religious conversion …) decides to steal and give away (or sell?) confidential information relating to thousands of the banks clients. Is that honourable? Is it moral? Is it legal? I sincerely hope that the banks customers take them to the cleaners. And I think all those who congratulate the whistleblower miss a big point – what if it was your information that had been given away? What if someone decided to give or sell details of your phone calls, shopping, investments, banking, travel, medical history etc. In this case they gave the data to HMRC. But suppose they decided to sell it to some Bulgarian hackers or Nigerian con men? You wouldn’t like it one bit (and quite rightly).

You yoursef quote the words ‘avoid taxes’ – you chose the quote remember, not me.

Well, Not Shiv – ‘…avoid taxes …’ seem to be the two key words in your quote. You did not say ‘evade’ taxes (it’s what you chose to quote remember) it says ‘avoid’. Big difference.

[Daphne – I think the reason the news media are using ‘avoid’ rather than ‘evade’ is legal. The latter can bring on a defamation suit.]

“…without Swiss bank accounts and various offshore financial operators, money laundering and tax evasion would be much harder to pull off. The diamond trade is extraordinarily lucrative, which is why some banks might look the other way to get a piece of the business. The files obtained by ICIJ and Le Monde show the bankers at HSBC were eager to court diamantaires and to help some of them avoid taxes by shielding their assets.”

This story’s not about tax avoidance:

http://www.icij.org/project/swiss-leaks/diamond-dealers-deep-trouble-bank-documents-shine-light-secret-ways

I cannot get exercised about tax avoidance and think that Lord Clyde’s famous 1929 judgement is spot on and more valid than ever: “No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer’s pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue”.

To me a far more worrying aspect of this affair is the leaking (or rather theft) of confidential information in the name of what? ‘Truth’, ‘Justice’. Rather than getting on a moral high horse about tax avoidance we should perhaps keep in mind Thomas Paine – “What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue”.

[Daphne – There are tax evasion issues and ‘criminal money’ issues. The first stories out were about the bank’s handling of money owned by Mexican drug cartels.]