A spokesman for the United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority denied to Compliance Matters that the regulator had pulled out of taking formal action when reviewing allegations that HSBC's Swiss private banking arm helped UHNW individuals evade tax between 2006 and 2007.

Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, told the British public recently that the FCA should have probed the banking giant for regulatory failings connected with the allegations of tax evasion, an assertion that the FCA spokesman hotly denied.

"We're not a tax regulator. We'd never look at tax evasion. The FCA never said that it was investigating. We were merely talking to the banks about what this episode (which pre-dated the financial crisis and also the money-laundering crisis at HSBC) meant for wider culture," he explained.

A few weeks ago Compliance Matters found out that the FCA had finally decided not to punish the bank for its ten-year money-laundering facilitation spree when compliance supremo David Bagley was at the helm. It is known that the regulator did install a 'skilled person' to monitor its progress in bolstering up its AML controls in 2013, in the wake of Bagley's resignation in front of a group of US politicians.

Compliance Matters asked the spokesman whether the FCA thought that tax evasion always involved money-laundering (a subject that definitely does not fall inside its purview) because it always involved an attempt to make 'dirty' (in this case, untaxed) money appear legitimate or to disguise its source. He said that this was 'not necessarily' the case. CM then theorised that fraud (also within the FCA's purview as it is one of its statutory objectives to suppress financial crime) had to be involved as well because tax evasion cannot happen without the falsification of documents or the giving of false information on documents. The spokesman's response was to point out that "it's the individual who doctors the documents, not the bank - he's the one who sends off the false tax returns."

The spokesman vehemently denied that the FCA's decision to wash its hands of HSBC Switzerland represented, in Andrew Tyrie's phrase, a return to the kind of 'light touch' regulation that had helped to create the financial crisis that began in 2008: "Last year the FCA levied £905 million in fines, all told. Barclays had to pay £284 million for forex failings. Lloyds had to pay £117 million for the PPI scandal. Just a few weeks ago, Barclays had to pay a further £72 million for failures to have adequte anti-money-laundering controls, and that was over just one transaction. Nobody could claim that we're going soft on people!"