Anyone who thinks that Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs was culpably negligent in successfully prosecuting only one out of 6,800 UK-related accounts provided in 2010 by French authorities, and recovering only £135 million in unpaid tax out of billions, ought to read this story.

In 2007 Hervé Falciani, an HSBC IT worker, sent the French government his list of 130,000 potentially tax-dodging customers of HSBC in Geneva. For some strange reason, the French took until 2010 before they handed it to other governments. George Papaconstantinou was finance minster of Greece at the time and a recipient of a list of 2,000 that was part of Falciani's larger data-set. According to his current prosecutors, he struck the names of 3 of his family members off the list as far as the Greek government was concerned.

The list is called the 'Lagarde List' after Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister who passed it on to Papaconstantinou. Needless to say, Greece was very tardy in investigating even the people Papaconstantinou left on the list and only made the slightest move towards doing so when a Greek journalist called Kostas Vaxevanis published it.

Papaconstantinou, 53, is on trial for the next 2 weeks. He denies one charge of doctoring a document and another of breach of trust. A lengthy prison sentence awaits him if he loses because one of his alleged victims was the Greek state.