BRITISH bank HSBC Holdings Plc. admitted late Sunday failings by its Swiss subsidiary, in response to media reports it helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets.

    “We acknowledge and are accountable for past compliance and control failures,” HSBC said Sunday after news outlets including French newspaper Le Monde and Britain’s The Guardian published allegations about its Swiss private bank.

    The Guardian, along with other news outlets, cited documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) via Le Monde.

    HSBC said that its Swiss arm had not been fully integrated into HSBC after its purchase in 1999, allowing “significantly lower” standards of compliance and due diligence to persist.

    The Guardian alleged in its report that the files showed HSBC’s Swiss bank routinely allowed clients to withdraw “bricks” of cash, often in foreign currencies which were of little use in Switzerland, marketed schemes which were likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes and colluded with some to conceal undeclared accounts from domestic tax authorities.

    HSBC said the Swiss private banking industry, long known for its secrecy, operated differently in the past and this may have resulted in HSBC having had “a number of clients that may not have been fully compliant with their applicable tax obligations.”

    Its private bank, especially its Swiss arm, had undergone “a radical transformation” in recent years, it said in a detailed four-page statement.

    HSBC’s Swiss private bank was largely acquired as part of its purchase of Republic National Bank of New York and Safra Republic Holdings, a U.S. private bank.(SD-Agencies)