HSBC Holdings PLC’s Swiss private-banking unit has been charged by French magistrates and ordered to post a 50 million euro (US$62 million) security deposit amid a tax-evasion probe.
The bank was charged on Tuesday with money laundering through tax fraud and illegal bank and financial marketing by the judges leading the investigation, Guillaume Daieff and Charlotte Bilger, according to a spokesman for the Paris-based national financial prosecutor’s office.
The official declined to say when the payment is due or elaborate on the probe.
“We will continue to cooperate with the French authorities to the fullest extent possible,” HSBC said in a statement on Friday. The probe covers the period from 2006 to 2007, the London-based bank said.
UBS AG was earlier this year forced to pay a 1.1 billion euro security deposit to cover potential penalties in a separate French tax-evasion probe. The Zurich-based bank is contesting the case and appealing the bill.
France scrutinized HSBC’s Swiss private bank after a former information technology worker at the firm, Herve Falciani, stole client account details from HSBC’s Geneva office in 2008 and passed them to the government.
Belgian prosecutors last month also charged HSBC’s Swiss unit, accusing it of illegally helping wealthy clients in the country evade hundreds of millions of euros in taxes. HSBC has previously said it is cooperating with the probe.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day