… the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green is obviously a major find – a much bigger find, indeed, than University Diaries has ever, uh, found. (A close contender is Monsignor Nunzio “Cinquecento” Scarano, but he didn’t run the bank the way Rev Green did.)
So far this blog has made do with the rad-rectitudinous team of Gordon Gee and Jim Tressel, plus (batting for UD‘s side) Yeshiva University trustees Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff. All of these men stand directly in the Elmer Gantry tradition, cloaking themselves in piety while engaging in antics that range from the morally despicable to, well, Madoff.
But Rev Green is made of bigger stuff than this, and he dovetails brilliantly with one of this blog’s most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Banker and priest and tax evasion enabler extraordinaire, Green inspires the Guardian’s editorialists to rhetorical heights.
“Values,” wrote the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green, “go beyond ‘what you can get away with’.” Reassuring words from the part-time priest who for years ran one of the world’s biggest banks, before being brought into government by David Cameron. Courtesy of the HSBC files, however, we now know that this bank, when under his stewardship – first as chief exec, later as chair – was involved in concealing “black” accounts from the taxman, servicing the secretly stowed funds of corrupt businessmen and allowing the withdrawal of “bricks” of untraceable cash.
In the face of these ugly facts about his old bank’s Swiss operation, Lord Green has said only that it is for HSBC, and not for him, to comment on that institution’s past and current behaviour. No wonder. His obvious refuge would be to claim that, as the boss of a global business in London, he had other worries and could not be expected to know every detail of what distant colleagues in Geneva were up to. Sadly for him, this potential shelter took a battering from something else he wrote: “For companies, where does this [ethical] responsibility begin? With their boards, of course. There is no other task they have which is more important. It is their job … to promote and nurture a culture of ethical and purposeful business throughout the organisation.”
You can’t blame HSBC. What better cover for a tax evasion scam than an Anglican clergyman who writes books about morality?
****************************
Green is also “advising the archbishop of Canterbury on how to shake up the Church of England, advocating more vicars in an MBA mould.” Stay tuned!
February 16th, 2015 at 3:19PM
You should follow the PCUSA where moral, ethical, and incompetence are not grounds to remove a minister. They will only act after, after, legal action has started all the while claiming local churches have the choice to remove clergy.
PCUSA clergy openly speak of tenure and lifetime employment. This is not an environment that leads to open discussion of faith or pastoral responsibility.
Steve Lucas
February 17th, 2015 at 3:52AM
This might be a teensy bit harsh. HSBC is a massive operation, and this was one branch of that operation in one country. Green is undoubtedly responsible as CEO, but there hasn’t been a sniff of a link to his office. It’s also worth noting that under Green HSBC, nearly alone of major global banks, required no bailout. In part because they did not get involved in the same dodgy practices. This is analagous to blaming the president for what happens in, say, the IRS office in Cincinnati. Partisans will of course disagree (as The Guardian does here), and in one sense there is responsibility, but more reflective folk will realise the limits of it.
February 17th, 2015 at 8:55AM
Colin: I understand what you’re saying, but even those sympathetic to Green tend to disagree with you. Both the Financial Times and The Spectator paint him as a veritable Mrs Jellyby, airily tending to his global charities while his immediate surroundings devolve into squalor. My favorite bit:
Naivety? Really? And you appointed this person to head up a massive financial operation? A person who reportedly thinks that when you tell, uh, a group of Swiss bankers to fix something having to do with, say, secrecy rules they fix it? Ever heard of follow-up?
No – I think my instinct about this case is probably correct. The Swiss were desperate to have a high-minded ninny (“That work-life balance — allowing him to write books, enjoy opera and indulge a passion for hill walking while others were tied to their desks — was the envy of his peers.”) at the top. Worked brilliantly – until a whistle blower came along. Even Dickens would have been amazed.
February 17th, 2015 at 9:15AM
Yes, but that is rather different from your usual B-School Boys, let alone your average football coach or Yeshiva trustee. Martin Vander Weyer wrote well on this in the Spectator. He is clear that this ruins Green’s reputation, which I think is right, but also that there is almost no way to run a huge global financial institution without something like this happening. He has a wonderful line to the effect that a big bank CEO should assume that someone, somewhere in his organisation is at every moment doing something utterly disastrous. My point is that there is a difference between trusting subordinates in a corporation so vast that personal oversight is impossible, and actually encouraging or engaging in that conduct. I think the IRS example is actually not a bad one: what is worse, Swiss bankers helping rich people avoid tax, or civil servants turning the most powerful and intrusive organs of state on the administration’s political enemies? Both land at the foot of the CEO – that’s how executive responsibility works- but I would not hold Obama to be a hypocrite. I’m not sure why Green is.
February 17th, 2015 at 9:37AM
Colin: I think we’re reasonably close on this one. Our difference, I suspect, hinges on whether you tend to believe (as I do) that the bank bought deniability with Green, and that Green knew far more about illegal activities than he … Well, he’s saying absolutely nothing about any of this so far, which is shocking, but completely in line with his approach, it seems, to life in general. Above it all.
February 17th, 2015 at 4:35PM
Is he also responsible for those sanctimonious HSBC ads in every European (and some American) jetway bridge? If so, he has a lot to answer for.